The Classical Foundations of Modern Historiography 0-520-07870-5

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1!rnaldo Momigliano

SATHER CLASSICAL LECTURES Volume

Fifty-Four

The Classical Foundations of Modern Historiography

The

Classical

Foundations of

Modern

Historiography Arnaldo Momigliano With a Foreword by Riccardo Di Donate

University of California Press

BERKELEY

•

LOS ANGELES

•

LONDON

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

© 1990 by The Regents of

the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Momigliano, Arnaldo.

The

classical

foundations of modern historiography

Momigliano. cm. (Sather classical p. ISBN 0-520-07870-5 (alk. paper) History. L I. Historiography D13.M638 1990 907'. 209 dc2o

—

—

lectures

;

Title.

IL Series.

v.

/

Arnaldo

54)

—

89-20510 CIP

23456789

Printed in the United States of America

The paper used of

in this publication

American National Standard

meets the

minimum

requirements

for Information Sciences

nence of Paper for Printed Library Materials,

— Perma-

ANSI Z39. 48-1984.

0

Contents

Foreword by Riccardo Di Donato Bibliographical

CHAPTER

I

Note

vii xiii

Introduction

i

Persian Historiography, Greek

5

Historiography, and Jewish

Historiography

CHAPTER

2

The Herodotean and

the

Thucydidean

29

Tradition

CHAPTER

3

The Rise

CHAPTER

4

Fabius Pictor and the Origins of National

of Antiquarian Research

54

80

History

CHAPTER

5

Tacitus

CHAPTER

6

The Origins

and the

Tacitist Tradition

of Ecclesiastical

109

132

Historiography

Conclusion Index of

Names

153

157

Foreword

1961-62 Sather

Invited to deliver the sity of

Classical Lectures at the Univer-

California at Berkeley, Arnaldo

Momigliano chose

a subject,

The Classical Foundations of Modern Historiography, to which he had already given

much

thought.

In the preface to his Classici (i960)

of the

and

Secondo Contributo

alia Storia degli Studi

in the introductory notes to several other studies

same period, reference

drew

atten-

which were waiting

to be

to the forthcoming lectures

tion to results, already partially achieved,

presented in a suitable context. The choice of subjects of the individual lectures

was

to provide a

framework

historiography could be related to

in

its

which the meaning of ancient

main developments

in

modern

historiography.

When

was conceived, Momigliano was at the height of his intellectual maturity. Significantly, after the monographs of his precocious beginnings he had opted for the form of studies of limited length, of a length which would encourage discussion by an interested audience. Once delivered, such lectures took the form of articles in this project

learned journals. This resulted in a certain dispersion of his

work

which the collections of the Contributi managed only partly to avoid.

Momigliano himself expressed

his concern,

still

the sixties, that his chief areas of interest did not

from the great diversity of

in the

emerge

second half of clearly

enough

his output.

The occasion of a series of lectures, dedicated to a subject in which he had the strongest interest, offered the possibility of putting together detailed analytical research in a comprehensive setting.

vii

Foreword

Vlll

The Sather

which represented

Lectures,

also the author's first sus-

much

tained contact with American academic hfe, met with Berkeley. They had been thought out years, then written

down

way

After the last of the public lectures

before a variety of audiences.

Momigliano wrote

which we have the manuscript,

March 1962,

still

a brief pref-

dated in Berkeley, 30

together with a copy typed in America:

Six lectures are not supposed to exhaust an argument.

should not have accepted to deliver them, because the vast territory on which

I

were delivered and

as they

two

with care, and in part, as was Momigliano's

habit, rehearsed in a preliminary

ace, of

success in

at length in the previous

they were

know

I

too

little

I

of

chose to speak. The lectures are published shall be content

I

If

if

they provoke discussion

and further exploration.

The notes provide no more than some help the points raised in

more than

I

The

I

De

Sanctis and

old friends

but,

F.

F.

among

us.

I

am

London and

and great

me

I

dear to

Dionisotti,

F.

at every page.

Venturi, G. Bii-

at every stage: the first

my

F.

W. Walbank.

friends

Warburg

of the

librarian of the

Warburg

Californian colleagues

much

files is in-

two

are

no

conscious also of a great debt to E. Bickerraan,

must mention with gratitude College

from ray bibliographical

hope, not foolish.

Jacoby should be apparent

Marrou, H. Strasburger and

H.-I.

My

I

Chabod, W. Maturi, C.

lanovich, Miss B. Smalley, helped

longer

of

have been reading and taking notes for

selection

and unjust,

On most

have learned from the writings and the conversations of B.

Croce, G.

My

lectures

thirty years.

evitably arbitrary

What

my

to orientation.

—

I

and colleagues of University

Institute,

Institute, Dr.

classicists

Last, but not least,

and

especially the wise

O. Kurz.

and modernists

—know

how

enjoyed their hospitality. The Berkeley Campanile will remain

my

heart almost as

my

native Campanile.

The preface is followed by a page bearing the dedication "To the memory of Gaetano Salvemini, Marc Bloch, Johan Fluizinga, Simon Dubnow, historians and witnesses of truth." Contrary to his usual custom, however, Momigliano did not authorize

immediate publication.

a bibliography covering

all

Fiis

intention to compile the footnotes and

the material dealt with soon proved to be

Foreword

IX

difficult to realize. But, evidently,

it

also

seemed to him that the com-

pletion of his original text required further work.

on

He came back

several occasions during the last twenty-five years of his

tures,

it

After

September 1987 numerous copies of the Sather Lecwith annotations and corrections, were found among his work-

death on

his

life.

to

i

ing papers. Just as a great writer ends up by identifying story, the

one which he

is

life

with his

writing and the one of which he considers

himself the protagonist, so Arnaldo Momigliano could not tear himself

away from the subject which he felt to be crucial. The lectures come out now in an edition which takes into account the history of their long composition. The reader should bear in mind that the book as we have it was conceived at the beginning of the sixties (after publication of the first two Contributi) and written in a first version between 1961 and 1962, subsequently becoming the object of careful meditation and of substantial rewriting almost fifteen years later, on the occasion of Momigliano's first lecture courses at the University of

Chicago

in

1975, with further revisions in the years that

fol-

lowed. For the revision and enrichment of the text the resources of rare

books

and the Newberry Library of Chicago

in the University Library

had proved very valuable,

September 1976 in an annual report to the Nuffield Foundation (which had awarded him a threeas he stated in

year research grant on his retirement from the chair of ancient history

London in 1975): access to this new material had given him a much more precise idea of what had been happening in Spain and Germany in the sixteenth century. The Nuffield grant enabled Momigliano to avail himself of research assistants from time to at University College

time. In an incomplete typescript produced by one of them, traces re-

main of an attempt

at providing footnotes for each chapter,

the author's subject card-index. This draft

authoritative reconstruction of

all

is

based on

not sufficient to permit

the footnotes

which he had

in-

tended; and Momigliano's surviving autograph notes are far from

complete.

It

has therefore been decided to publish the text without any

notes.

The version now published

represents the latest stage of the

work

—the chapters on national historiography (1975) and on Tacitism (1978) — substantially modified left

by the author,

who

in at least

two cases

X

Foreword

his text

and enlarged

it

to almost twice the length of the original

lectures.

Anne Marie Meyer has sions

collated the typescripts of the various ver-

and checked the author's annotations. As a

drafting of the tw^o of additions

conclusive.

and corrections, her

The

and

tations

main versions and

of the

direct vs^itness of the

many

intervening stages

been

role in establishing the text has

editing of the volume, the systematic checking of quo-

and preparation of the typescript for publica-

references,

tion are effectively due to her: our collaboration in the final phase of editorial decisions has

been for

me

a pleasure

and an honour.

Normal conventions of a critical edition have been adopted in constituting the text, making minor changes only where consistency with

own

the author's

general and particular criteria called for them, es-

pecially in quotations

which have

from English translations of ancient writers,

as a rule been cited

from editions

in the

Loeb

Classical

Library.

The decision not to provide a select bibliography at the end of each chapter was taken out of respect for the state of the text as left by the author and, in

all

likelihood, correctly interprets the reasons for the ap-

A

parent noncompletion of the work.

selection does not

make

sense

The note that follows refers the reader to relevant works by Momigliano in which the bibliographical references selected by him are indicative of unless

it

corresponds in

all

regards to the intentions of the writer.

the course of his intellectual explorations.

We

are grateful for helpful suggestions to

Tim

Cornell, Michael

Crawford, Carlo Dionisotti, and Carlotta Dionisotti.

The

initial

statement in the text of Momigliano's Conclusion which

he read at the end of his

last lecture

opens a chink, hitherto unknown,

The trilogy which he was planning came to fruition, with the volume on the development of Greek biography and with Alien Wisdom, albeit in a less organic form than that here envisaged. The publication of the present volume, which is the first constituent on

a project

which was

to characterize the last third of his

life.

of the trilogy, helps towards a better understanding of the significance of the final meditations of the author

passion

—which were

— on the nature, the function, the

limits,

full

of

wisdom and

and the methods of

Foreword

XI

historical research: this last contribution by all

which went before

it,

Arnaldo Momigliano,

like

proceeds on the main road of the search for

truth.

Riccardo Di Donato University of Pisa

Department of Classical Philology

May

1989

Bibliographical

may be

For general orientation the reader tions of the bibliographies

Note

referred to the general sec-

appended by Arnaldo Momigliano to the

various editions of his books The Development of Greek Biography

(Harvard University

Press, 1971)

and Alien Wisdom: The Limits of

Hellenization (Cambridge University Press, 1975, 1978); to the general section

on

historical

method

in Introduzione bibliografica alia sto-

greca fino a Socrate (Florence, 1975); and to the bibliographies in

ria

and Theory

the essays "Tradition and the Classical Historian," History

1972, pp. 279—293 (= Quinto Contributo alia Storia degli Studi Classici e del Mondo Antico [Rome, 1975], pp. 13—31), and, above all,

XI,

3,

"The Place of Ancient Historiography Les etudes classiques aux XIX^ toire des idees: Entretiens

tome

et

in

XX^

XXVI

Modern

Historiography," in

siecles: leur place

dans

I'his-

(1979) (Fondation Hardt, Van-

doeuvres-Geneve, 1980), pp. 125—157

{

= Settimo Contributo, 1984,

pp. 13-36).

For the individual chapters 1.

cf.:

"Fattori orientali della storiografia ebraica post-esihca e della

storiografia greca," in Atti del

Convegno

mondo greco-romano, Roma, 11— 14 ale

sul

tema La

Persia

ed

il

1965 (Accademia Naziondei Lincei, 363, 76, 1966), pp. 137—146, and Rivista Storica Ital-

LXXVII,

aprile

1965, pp. 456—464 = Terzo Contributo, 1966, pp. 807—818; also Essays in Ancient and Modern Historiography [Oxford

iana

2,

[

and Middletown, Conn., 1977], pp. 25—35). 2. "Storiografia greca," RSI LXXXVII, (

i,

1975,

PP-

17—46

= Sesto Contributo, 1980, pp. 33-67); "Greek Historiography," His-

tory

and Theory XVII,

i,

1978, pp. 1-28; "History and Biography,"

xiii

Bibliographical

xiv

The Legacy of Greece: A New Appraisal, endon Press, Oxford, 1981), pp. 155-184. in

M. I.

by

ed.

Note

Finley (Clar-

"Friedrich Creuzer and Greek Historiography," Journal of the

3.

Warburg and Courtauld

Institutes IX, 1946, pp.

152—163 [= Contri-

butor 1955, PP- 2,33—248; also Studies in Historiography [London, 1969], pp. 75—90); "Ancient History and the Antiquarian," JWCI XIII, 1950, pp.

285—315

Contributor pp. 67—106; Studies, pp. i—

39); "L'eredita della filologia antica e

il

metodo

RSI LXX,

storico,"

3,

1958, pp. 442—458 {^Secondo Contributo, i960, pp. 463-480). 4. "Linee per una valutazione di Fabio Pittore," Rendiconti Acca-

demia dei Lincei, Classe

moraH, storiche

di Scienze

e filologiche, serie

XV, 7—12, i960, pp. 310—320 = Terzo Contributo, pp. 55— 68); "Did Fabius Pictor Lie?" (review of A. Alfoldi, Early Rome and the Latins [University of Michigan Press, 1965]), New York Review of Books, vol. V, no. 3, September 1965, pp. 19—22 = Essays, pp. 99—

VIII, vol.

(

{

105; Sesto Contributo, pp. 69—75). 5.

Section "Tacitismo" of the entry "Tacito

ciclopedia Italiana, vol.

Commentary on

Cornelio" in the En-

P.

XXXIII, Rome, 1936; "The

Tacitus," Journal of

Roman

Studies

First Political

XXXVII,

1947,

pp. 91— loi {= Contributo, pp. 37—59; Essays, pp. 205—229); review^ of J. von Stackelberg, Tacitus in der Romania: Studien zur literarischen Rezeption des Tacitus in Italien and Frankreich (Tubingen, i960), Archiv fiir das Studium der Neueren Sprachen und Literaturen 200, i,

75 (= Terzo Contributo, pp. 775-776); review of R. Haussler, Tacitus und das historische Bewusstsein (Heidelberg, 1965), RSI

1963,

p.

LXXVIII,

1966, pp. 974-976 = Quinto Contributo, pp. 1007— loio); review of K. C. Schellhase, Tacitus in Renaissance Political 4,

{

Thought (University I,

of Chicago Press, 1976), Classical Philology 47,

1979, pp. 72.-74 = Settimo Contributo, pp. 499—502). 6. "L'eta del trapasso fra storiografia antica e storiografia medi-

evale,"

{

RSI LXXXI,

2,

1969, pp. 286-303

(

= Quinto Contributo, pp.

49—71); "Popular Religious Beliefs and the Late in Studies in

Church History,

vol. 8, eds.

Canon

Roman

G.J.

Historians,"

Cuming and De-

rek Baker (Cambridge University Press, i97i),pp. i— 18 (= Quinto Con-

73—92; Essays, pp. 141— 159); "Historiography of Religion: The Western Tradition," in The Encyclopedia of Religon, vol. 6 (New tributo, pp.

York, 1987), pp. 383—390 {=Ottavo Contributo, 1987, pp. 27-44).

Introduction

The growth

of social history and archaeology

something has been happening

in the

is

kingdom

the clearest sign that of Clio since the days

of Thucydides. In the nineteenth century three historians as different as

Ranke, Macaulay, and Eduard Meyer regarded Thucydides as the

model

historian. This opinion

late Professor

still

Gomme, was one

of

finds supporters.

my

One

of them, the

predecessors in the Sather chair

Gomme's wonderful pugnacity was no persuade many of us that Thucydides cannot be im-

a few years ago. But even

longer sufficient to

proved upon. Thucydides wrote as a student of contemporary

and military and military

political

The method he developed was that of a political historian of his own times. The historians of the twentieth history.

century can explore any period of the past as history in the

if it

were contemporary

Thucydidean sense because they know

how

to exploit

types of evidence that take us back to almost any past. Furthermore, the very notion of political history

nowadays

relation to other aspects of history that

it

raises so

many

issues in

has ceased to indicate some-

thing definite and recognisable. Books like Huizinga's

Waning of

the

Middle Ages^ or Marc Bloch's Caracteres originaux de Vhistoire rurale frangaise, or even Perry Miller's

The

New

England Mind cannot be

presented as mere developments of the Thucydidean type of history.

we must

While these books also have

their antecedents in Antiquity,

look for such in the

antiquarian and erudite research rather

field of

than in the tradition of Thucydidean history. The variety and complexity of our present

work

in history give

new prominence

to links

with the classical world which were previously neglected.

I

2

Introduction

If

ancient erudite research

much

the obvious antecedent of so

is

our cuhural and social history, our interest

of

in ecclesiastical history rep-

Our study

resents a link with ancient ecclesiastical historiography.

of

conscious, subconscious, and unconscious historical motivation gives a

new

value to the psychological history of Tacitus and calls attention

enormous authority among students

to his

of history

the early sixteenth to the early nineteenth century. political historiography

is

now

discredited

politics

from

fact that

mere

and

The

and generally recognised to

be tedious invites a reassessment of our debt to Greek historians. At

same time, we have come to realise that Greek historiography was not naturally and inevitably destined to become the foundation of our

the

Western historiography.

We should not have inherited Greek historiogRomans who made Greek Roman Empire. Above all we

raphy without the bold intervention of some historiography the historiography of the

should not have our national histories without the example of national historiography, and Livy.

more

specifically

Even so Greek historiography had

toriography. Both Greek and postexilic into existence against the clearly

show

their

common

competed with each

how much

other,

to

Roman

without the example of

compete with Hebrew

Hebrew

historiography

his-

came

background of the Persian Empire and origin. Later

and

it is

Jewish and Greek historians

a matter of research to determine

of Jewish thought passed into Christian

works such

as the

ecclesiastical histories of Late Antiquity. If

these preliminary considerations are valid there

tion for asking the following six questions: (i)

Jewish historiographies

in

rather than Herodotus tiquity? (3) (4)

What part

How was

become

the

prevail?

(2)

what extent did

Why

did Thucydides

most authoritative historian of An-

did the antiquarians play in historical research?

Greek historiography imported into

of Tacitus in historical thought? (6)

Why

siastical historiography a tradition of its

To each of these questions I

justifica-

to

the romanisation of Greek historiography entail?

which

some

What have Greek and

common and why and

Greek historiography ultimately

is

I

and

in

Rome and what did (5) What is the place what way has

eccle-

own?

have devoted one of the six lectures

have the great honour to deliver

in this University.

tentionally left aside other questions that are related to

my

I

have

in-

subject.

I

Introduction

3

not discuss the biographical tradition and shall not try to assess

shall

the influence of ancient theories of history

methodology of

history.

on

later

philosophy and

could adduce various reasons for

I

my

silence

on these matters (one is my suspicion that out of a hundred persons who can explain an event only one or two have the technical ability the historian's equipment at all

—whether

moment

I

it

—to decide whether that event was an event

happened). But

it is

more honest

to

admit that

at the

do not know enough about the history of biography and

about the history of the philosophy of history to attempt even the most superficial generalisations

some that

specific

my

work on

about them.

I

hope to be able

the history of biography.

present argument

is

have chosen to speak.

am

aware; and

I

I

should

in

do not

feel,

to

do

however,

seriously affected by the absence of a dis-

cussion of biography and of theories of history.

about the enormous gaps

I

on

later

my knowledge

shall try like to

I

am more

concerned

on which

I

not to conceal the lacunae of which

I

ask

my

of the subjects

audience to accept what

I

shall

say as a provisional attempt to reassess the value of ancient historiog-

raphy

in

writing.

the light of the twentieth-century revolution

in

history

CHAPTER ONE

Persian Historiography, Greek Historiography, and Jewish Historiography

I

We

are increasingly

aware of the

both Greeks and Jews de-

fact that

veloped some of the most characteristic features of their civilizations within the frame of the Persian Empire.

It

therefore

makes sense

to ask

whether both Greek historiography and Jewish postexilic historiogra-

phy were influenced

either by Persian historiography or by other liter-

ary traditions to be found in the Persian Empire. But this question only one of the several questions

Greek historiography. and

We

we can ask

comparing Jewish and

in

can for instance ask:

common?

biblical historiography in

(2)

is

(i)

What have Greek

Which, on the other hand,

main differences between Greek and biblical historiography? Why did Greek historiography prove to be so vital while Jewish his-

are the (3)

toriography ended, rather abruptly, in the

first

century a.d.?

My lecture is consequently divided into six parts:

(i)

on Persian

his-

on the general acquaintance of Greek and Jewish historians with Persian affairs; (3) on specific points of possible Oriental

toriography; influence

(2)

on Greek and Jewish

historians; (4)

on certain features of the

reaction of the Greek and Jewish historians to the political situation

represented by the Persian Empire; ferences between

why Jewish

(5)

on the most

Greek and Jewish historians; and

characteristic dif(6)

on the reasons

historiography died out prematurely.

II In the perfectly respectable circles in

young,

it

was

a

dogma

that

if

which

I

moved when

I

was

you wanted to study Persian history you

5

6

Persian, Greek,

know Greek, but if you wanted to learn Greek know German. Herodotus was the authority for

had to

and Jewish Historiography

to

you had

history

Persian history,

Karl Julius Beloch for Greek history.

The tory

may have changed

situation

is still

in the

Greek

in

history.

But Persian

his-

hands of Herodotus. The decipherment of the Behis-

tun inscription and the excavations of Persepolis and Susa, however

done

far-reaching, have not

done

for Persia

Egypt and Babylonia.

for

If

what

the

same kind

of

the progress in Oriental history can

be measured in terms of emancipation from Herodotus,

much

as

evident

it is

modern methods

of

Mesopotamian and Egyptian history has been. Eduard Meyer was commissioned

In

that Persian history has not been revolutionised by

research as

work has

the early years of this century

to

write the article "Persia in Antiquity" for the eleventh edition of the

Encyclopaedia Britannica. The

No

fresh.

article

article

appeared

and

in 19 ii

on Egypt, Mesopotamia, or Asia Minor

still

is

in Antiquity

could have survived so long.

The sians

fact that

we

most of our information about the ancient

get

from Greek sources does not mean that the Persians

relied

Per-

on the

alien races of their empire for the preservation of the record of their

own in

activities.

Aramaic.

They had

We

from insomnia:

manded

their

own

historiography either in Persian or

know what a Persian king did when he "On that night could not the king sleep, and

to bring the

book

read before the king"

matter of chronicles,

of records of the chronicles;

(6, i). if

The Book

of Esther can be trusted in the

not of the insomnia. The Book of Esther

the acts of his [Ahasuerus']

power and

count of the greatness of Mordecai, they not written in the of Ezra

yond

2),

But

he com-

and they were

also imply that the Persian chronicles contained documents:

Persia?" (10,

suffered

all

book

of his might,

how

"And

and the

all

full ac-

the king advanced him, are

of the chronicles of the kings of

this implication is

may

by no means certain.

and Nehemiah, whose knowledge of Persian

Media and The Books

institutions

is

be-

dispute, confirm the existence of Persian Royal Chronicles. In one

of the

Aramaic documents

relating to the opposition against the re-

building of the walls of Jerusalem, King Artaxerxes

I is

asked to read

the chronicles of his ancestors, where he will find evidence about the

past rebellions of Jerusalem (Ezra 4, 15).

The writer obviously presup-

and Jewish Historiography

Persian, Greek,

7

poses that the kings of Persia had access to chronicles on events of prePersian times.

He was

certainly correct. Babylonian chronicles,

ing else, were available for consultation about the

if

noth-

more remote

past.

Also the Greek Ctesias claimed to have used the royal records "in

which the Persians

in

accordance with a certain law of theirs kept an

account of their ancient affairs" (Diod.

II,

33, 4).

But the Persian chronicles disappeared very

As

early.

far as

we

know, the Chronicles of the Sassanian Kings, which the Byzantine Agathias mentions in the sixth century a.d., were not in any way connected with the Chronicles of the Achaemenid Kings. As Th. Noldeke

observed long ago, one of the striking features about the Persian revival

under the Sassanian kings

Achaemenids. The

knew almost nothing about

that they

is

historical

and

political tradition of the

the

Achaeme-

had gone overboard long before the revolution of the third century A.D. which purported to restore Persian national values. The Avesta does not mention either Darius or Xerxes. When Firdausi came nids

Shanameh in the tenth century, the break with the Achaemenid past had been almost complete for more than a thousand years. Inscriptions are the only surviving evidence for the way in which the Persians thought about history. They are of limited value for obvious reasons. Nobody would describe the Res Gestae Divi Augusti as Au-

to write the

gustus' autobiography. In fact

we know

that the

Roman emperor

write his autobiography in a very different form. There

is

did

no reason

to

apply another criterion to that remote ancestor of the Res Gestae^

namely, the account King Darius gave of himself in the Behistun or Bi-

sutun inscription. His purpose was self-glorification

in a limited

num-

ber of words, not a complete autobiography. In the case of the Behistun inscription there

is

the additional difficulty that

whether King Darius wrote

it

for

men

we do not know

or for gods to read.

By putting

on a rock 300 feet high over the road, and by barring it, he made his words available only to professional rock

his inscription

the access to

climbers or to gods.

He

certainly

the inscription circulated later, lation

was

centrally organised.

wrote for

select circles.

But copies of

and one wonders whether

With

all this

this circu-

the Behistun inscription

teaches us something about the Persian attitude to history. First of it

all,

shows that the Persians were capable of some kind of autobiography

and Jewish Historiography

Persian, Greek,

8

written in the clear

and

person. Second, the account

first

is

from any miraculous intervention.

free

When

was deciphered, scholars were surprised

inscription

firmed Herodotus in so

many

basically factual,

the Behistun

to see that

precise details, such as the

it

names

con-

of the

would have been more appropriate to be surprised that the Persian inscription proved to be on an equal historical level with Herodotus. The King of Persia relies on his own gods, Magi. Perhaps

rebellious

it

but direct intervention of gods

The outlook menids

is

rebels.

is

his

is

not mentioned.

The pride

of the

main concern. He

lie,

he

is

loy-

relishes cruelty against con-

But other inscriptions show that

get something for our purpose from the

The

the truth.

towards

his attitude

and external enemies was not always so barbaric.

subjects

Achae-

notorious. Darius emphasises his physical

superiority: his enemies are the

alty of the satraps

quered

miraculous forms

aristocratic, not theological.

is

in their ancestry

and moral

in

final section of the

We

could

Babylonian

chronicle of Nabonidus, which records the triumph of Cyrus over his

enemy,

we were

if

certain that this part of the chronicle

inspired by Cyrus or his final section

had

a

hand

the matter

staff.

directly

There are curious touches of irony in

this

from which we may well suspect that a Persian must have

in describing the ineptitude of the last

is

was

Babylonian king. But

too uncertain, and the chronicle of Nabonidus as a whole

belongs to another tradition.

What we

clearly perceive in the Persian historical inscriptions

is

a

king-centered society, a strongly aristocratic outlook, an emphasis on loyalty sions.

accompanied by corresponding violence of

On

the other

hand we have seen

intrigues

and pas-

that to a Persian the facts were

Old Persian with its easy syntactical structure and its clear verbal system was not a bad instrument for historical prose. If we discount the monotony of the formulas and the narrowness of the subject matfacts.

ter,

we can

see that here there

is

a historical style in the making.

Ill

So much for the direct evidence on Old Persian historiography. Our next question perceive

it

is

whether Persian historiography, such as we can dimly

through direct or indirect evidence, influenced the devel-

and Jewish Historiography

Persian, Greek,

opment

9

Greek historiography on the one

of

toriography on the other.

We

and of Hebrew

side

his-

have no evidence that the Jews knew

Greek historians or that the Greeks knew Jewish historians before the third century B.C., but there is indisputable evidence that the Greek and Jewish historians were aware that Photius

in his

with the Persians.

in contact

summary

of Diodorus'

Book

am

I

well

XL attributes to

Hecataeus of Miletus a description of Jewish religion which,

if

authen-

would imply that Hecataeus of Miletus knew something about the Sacred Books of the Jews at the end of the sixth century B.C. Nor am I unaware that Franz Dornseiff, a scholar for whom I have the greatest respect, has definitely maintained that the fragment is authentic and

tic,

implies the direct acquaintance of Hecataeus of Miletus with Jewish religion.

But

am

I

quite certain that either Photius or Diodorus attrib-

uted the fragment on the Jews to the wrong Hecataeus. The Hecataeus

who

man

spoke about the Jews was not the

fore the Persian Wars, but his

fourth century B.C.

The evidence world

is

namesake

of

who lived Abdera who wrote in of Miletus

— a well-known authority on the Jews. The

rise of

Greek historiography

connected with that of geographical studies. The

about

his geographical explorations

Gulf and elsewhere

in the Persian

of

King Darius

in

about 500

Greek evidence. He travelled in its heyday.

Greek

traveller

pay and by the order

B.C. (Herod. IV, 44).

Hecataeus of Mile-

He was

and compared Greek with non-

in the Persian

Empire

as a Persian subject

His successor Herodotus was born a Persian subject in

city of Halicarnassus.

though he was

fully

Persian Empire. sian.

in the

closely

Greek to write

— Scylax of Caryanda, a

— did so

interested in Oriental genealogies

the

first

is

geographer and genealogist, wrote under the Persians.

tus, a

the

between Greek historians and the Persian

for contacts

easy to summarise.

be-

He

He

never liked the Ionian rebellion,

aware of the meaning of the Greek victory over the travelled in countries

Though he never saw

Persia itself

which were or had been

Per-

and was unable to speak any

foreign language, his histories are teeming with alleged Persian traditions.

They came

must never

to

him secondhand and

lose sight of the

clearly distorted.

But we

primary fact that the discovery of the Be-

histun inscription confirmed Herodotus' position as our most reliable

witness for Persian affairs. Even in Athens, Herodotus was able to find

lO

and Jewish Historiography

Persian, Greek,

an aristocratic Persian refugee, Zopyrus son of Megabyzus, and to talk

We

know more about Xanthus the Lydian, a contemporary of Herodotus, who wrote in Greek as a Persian subject about the history of his own country, Ly-

to

him

Greek about

in

The same

dia.

Persia (III, i6o).

should

like to

applies to other fifth-century writers, such as Dionysius

who

of Miletus, Hellanicus of Mytelene,

and Charon of Lampsacus,

collected Persian traditions in places

where acquaintance with Persian

customs and peoples must have been

fairly

easy and

common. They

at

least prove the constant concern of early Greek historians with Persian

history

—not a reason

Cnidus

is

for surprise. In the next generation Ctesias of

He was

a doctor to Artaxerxes

and claimed to have

lived at the Persian court

our big disappointment.

Mnemon before 405

B.C.

He

for seventeen years.

certainly

knew

Persian, and,

he had wanted

if

he could have collected an immense amount of direct information

to,

about Persian

seems to have been more con-

history. Unfortunately he

cerned with sensationalism than with truth, and was obsessed by the

preoccupation of giving Herodotus the seen,

is

that Ctesias

useless to us.

The

is

more

lie.

The

result, as F.

of a novelist than a historian. Yet he

was

fact that he

a liar does not

mean

absorbed the atmosphere of the Oriental court with

and unreliable

tales.

We

that he

who

is

not

had not

love intrigues

its

are entitled to ask the question whether his

fantastic tales are infected by Persian habits of storytelling.

persons

Jacoby has

travelled in Persian territory

The

list

and wrote about Persian

tory goes on throughout the fourth century.

Xenophon

is

of

his-

another ob-

vious name, though in the Cyropaedia he clearly did not intend to write history: the Cyropaedia

type

known

also

from other

is

a well-defined philosophic Utopia of a

Socratics.

remind us that Greek historiography with Persia and was practised by sian traditions

As

God

Jewish Ezra

have said

I

in its early stages

men whose

still

enough to

was concerned

beyond dispute.

H. Schaeder was

of heaven"

affairs. If

is

acquaintance with Per-

for the Jews, the evidence of the Persian impact

in general. If

the

is

What

means

is

clear

enough

right, Ezra's title as "scribe of the

that he

was

law of

a Persian official in charge of

Schaeder was wrong, the activity of the mysterious

remains to be explained in a Persian context: he cannot be

wiped out of

history.

The more open Nehemiah

tells

us that he

was

the

Persian, Greek,

and Jewish Historiography

cupbearer of Artaxerxes

I.

II

The autobiographies

hemiah, which are incorporated

of both Ezra

books that bear

in the

and Ne-

their

names,

provide the confirmation of their acquaintance with Persian ways. The

Books of Daniel, Judith, and Esther are a more difficuh matter. Each of the three books preserves features of the Achaemenid period and raises the

problem of whether the story

it

tells

originated before Alex-

ander the Great. The Book of Daniel has some authentic details about the

fall

and the very name of

of Babylon, such as Belshazzar's banquet

him

Belshazzar, though Daniel mistakenly takes

to be the son of

Ne-

buchadnezzar, not the son and co-ruler of Nabonidus. The story of Esther

enacted entirely at the Persian court. The story

is

is

absurd, but

many details about the Persian court ring true. For instance, the author knows about the seven privileged men who "saw the king's face and kingdom" (i, 14), and has a clear idea of the Persian service (8, 10). The story of Judith has Holofernes as the chief and the eunuch Bagoas as his adjutant. The two names are com-

sat first in the

postal villain

mon

enough, but they appear together only

taxerxes

Ochos

III

know, the authors of these three books It

will

the

It

expedition of Ar-

against Phoenicia and Egypt about

coincidence can hardly be fortuitous.

incompetence.

in the

would take too long

On vie

to

350

B.C.

the other hand, as

with each other

tell

The

we

all

in historical

of the mistakes of Daniel.

be enough to remind ourselves that according to Daniel, Darius

Mede

— a non-existent monster—not Cyrus the Persian, conquered

Babylon and that the kings of Persia from Cyrus to Alexander were four, not eleven.

Babylon

in

As

to the

Book

597 but was appointed grand

King Xerxes, that

is,

124 years

Mordecai was deported to

of Esther,

later, in

vizier in the twelfth year of

473

presumably a hundred years younger than

B.C. he.

His cousin Esther was

According to the Book

Jews returned from exile and rededicated the temple under Nebuchadnezzar, who is described as reigning "over the Assyrians

of Judith the

at

Nineveh." At the end of the seventeenth century the great Montfau-

con, mastering to

make

all

the resources of the learning of his time,

was one of the first signs that exegesis was beginning to crumble

sense of this howler. His failure

the citadel of traditional biblical

under the attacks of

The

was unable

critics

such as

late date of the three

Hugo

books, while

Grotius. it

explains their mistakes,

is

12

Persian, Greek,

and Jewish Historiography

not of course incompatible with the preservation of genuine Persian elements. Indeed

we have

to reckon with the possibility of

some

of the

contents of the three books going back to non-Jewish sources. There

is

something to be said for the theory that the Book of Esther goes back

The festival of Purim, which the Book of Esther purports to explain, was non-Jewish in origin, as its non-Hebrew name shows. Daniel has no obvious antecedent in extant Jewish literature, and is hardly to be separated from non-Jewish texts such as the Demotic Chronicle. Details are obscure and controversial, but we must never forget that the Jews of the postexilic period spoke Aramaic and therefore were able to read the gentile literature in this internato a non-Jewish model.

tional language of the Persian Empire. There

is

of course a difference

between the position of the Jews and the position of the Ionian Greeks in the Persian

two

for

Empire. The Persian rule over the Jews was continuous

centuries.

The

Persian rule over the Ionian Greeks

rupted by Athenian control for the greater part of the question

is,

however, the same

in

both cases:

fifth

how much

was

inter-

century.

Our

did the ruler

influence the historiography of the ruled?

There are three ways

One

is

in

which

this influence

could manifest

the direct influence of Persian historiography.

The second

itself. is

the

influence of other Oriental historiographies accessible within the Persian Empire.

tutions

and

The

third

is

the

more generic

literary traditions other

influence of Oriental insti-

than historiography.

I

shall suggest

that the influence of Oriental institutions and literary traditions other

than historiography appears to have been the most important. But

we must examine

first

the evidence.

IV want to examine the evidence under three heads: (i) the use of documents in historiography; (2) the autobiographical and biographical tradition; and (3) the novelistic background. I

I

begin with the documents.

pler.

On

the Jewish side the question

Jewish postexilic historiography

is

is

sim-

characterised by extensive ver-

batim quotation of documents which come or are alleged to come

from

archives. This

is

different

from the implicit

utilisation of official

Persian, Greek,

and Jewish Historiography

13

documents, such as the Hst of Solomon's highest be found in the Books of Kings

(I,

4),

which

officials,

is

to

or from the quotation of poetry,

The authenticity of the documents does not concern us here, though I would call authentic the majority of the documents given in Ezra and Nehemiah, in the Books of Maccabees, and in Josephus, who inherited the habit of quoting documents such as Deborah's song (Judges

from

his

Jewish predecessors. Ezra

sians attached to is

the

5).

Book

documents

aware of the importance the Per-

order to establish legal rights, and so

in

of Esther (9, 32).

is

It

seems natural to

relate this feature of

Jewish postexilic historiography to the impact of Persian example either in administrative practice or

perhaps (though

tain) in the historiographical practice of the

The Greek

side of the matter

tory as free people. rights

from

leucids,

their overlords as the

is

much

less

is

very uncer-

Royal Chronicles.

far less clear.

The Greeks wrote

They were not so obsessed by

and the Romans. This

riography

is

this

his-

the need to claim

Jews were under the Persians, the Se-

enough to explain why Greek

is

concerned with the

histo-

quotation of docu-

literal

ments. Herodotus quotes only inscriptions, oracles, and other poems.

He

uses,

however, other written documents, such as the

list

of the sa-

trapies (III, 89), the description of the Persian postal service (V, 52),

and the catalogue of the Persian army presents a problem with regard to ficult to reject

out of hand the

its

first

Each of these

(VII, 61).

origins

and

its

value. But

impression that there

is

document behind each of them. Herodotus seems quainted with Persian documentary evidence. sian

Among

the

Greek historians we possess, Thucydides

is

texts

it is

some

dif-

Per-

to be ac-

the

first

to

copy documents ultimately coming from archives. Curiously enough, several of these

documents concern

quoted verbatim by Thucydides, letters

five

Persia.

Out

of eleven

documents

have to do with Persia: the two

exchanged between Pausanias and Xerxes and the three versions

of the Persian-Spartan agreement of 411

Schwartz thought that

if

B.C.

body can say what Thucydides would have done it is

true that there

of these documents.

Why

is

E.

work he would run contrary to his style. No-

Thucydides had finished

have eliminated the documents, as they

work, but

Wilamowitz and

if

his

he had finished his

something surprising

in the inclusion

did Thucydides choose to introduce them?

Persian, Greek,

14

Was he preceded by some habits?

Ionian historian

and Jewish Historiography

who was

nearer to Oriental

We cannot say. The only footnote want to add is that our next I

document in Greek historiography is apparently the letter of the Persian or Median king Stronaggaius to Queen Zaraenaia in a fragment of Ctesias discovered not very long ago (Pap. Ox. 2330 = fr. reference to a

8b Jacoby). This at that.

is

a forgery by Ctesias himself,

But we are again on Persian

knew

and a ridiculous one

territory. Hellanicus

178 Ja-

(fr.

communicated by letter. coby) I pass to the second point on autobiographical and biographical style. As is well known, the Chronicler who put together the Books of Ezra and Nehemiah in their present form used parts of their autobithat Persian kings

ographies. Nehemiah's autobiography

memoirs

are sadly mutilated,

is

splendidly preserved. Ezra's

and may not even be authentic. The

chronological order of some sections has clearly been upset: a pity, be-

know more about this lonely and the Torah. It is now generally rec-

cause one would give something to

almost inhumanly harsh fighter for

ognised that the two autobiographical fragments cannot be treated in isolation

from the vast Oriental tradition of autobiographical writing

in the first person. Professor

inclined to connect at

Nehemiah's autobiography with the Babylonian documents of

least this

Mowinckel was

kind rather than with the Persian ones. This

is

a question

more

of

than of argument. Other scholars have shown parallels in Egyp-

taste

tian autobiographies.

The Behistun

inscription of Darius

was known

Aramaic version to the Jews of Elephantina more or less at the time when Ezra and Nehemiah wrote. Both Ezra and Nehemiah gave and also specifically Persian a Jewish twist to the general Oriental in its

—

tradition of autobiography in the

What about

first

the Greeks? There

person.

was always

a tradition of autobio-

graphical accounts in Greek literature. Nestor telling of his youth

most

a conscious joke in the IHad,

and Odysseus never spared

about himself, whether authentic or not. Hesiod

and

his father

the

first

tells

and brother. Lyrics and tragedy are

is al-

details

us about himself

full

of accounts in

person. Heraclitus and Empedocles have superb passages

about themselves

in the first person.

biographical prose in the

The most obvious

first

case in the

person fifth

On is

the other

hand lengthy auto-

a rare event in classical Greece.

century B.C.

is

that of Ion of Chios,

Persian, Greek,

who wrote

and Jewish Historiography

in the first

15

person about people he knew.

banquet

He

tells

how

he

440 B.C. Hecataeus of Miletus started his historical book with a programmatic declaration in the first person. Both Hecataeus and Ion of Chios belonged to Ionian culture, where met Sophocles

at a

in

Oriental influences were active.

perhaps more important. Scylax wrote a

bi-

ography of Heraclides, the tyrant of Mylasa. Both the writer and

his

Another observation

is

subject lived in the Persian sphere. In Herodotus the best personal stories (for instance, the

biography of Democedes) come from the East-

ern side. Metropolitan Greece provided very rial

for Herodotus.

details only

when

little

biographical mate-

Even Thucydides pays attention

his heroes

to biographical

—Pausanias and Themistocles — are to be

found on the fringes of the Persian Empire. Greeks of Asia Minor were more interested

We may

suspect that the

in biographical details

than

the Greeks, say, of Sparta or Athens.

These considerations lead us to our third point, on the novelistic

background of Jewish and Greek historiography. society of the Persian

The

Empire people told

stories

In the international

on an international

pagan story turned into a Jewish one is the story of Achikar, which was known to the Jews of Elephantina as early scale.

classic case of a

as the fifth century B.C.

and reappears

in the

Book

knew the Achikar story in the fourth mocritus may have been acquainted with it in

of Tobit.

The Greeks

century B.C., and De-

certainly

the late

fifth

century.

Take another novelistic motif. According to Herodotus, Otanes managed to find out that the alleged Smerdis son of Cyrus was a fraud. Otanes' daughter Phaedima was in the harem of Pseudo-Smerdis, and her to discover the The words of — Otanes "Daughter, thou of noble blood" — and the answer of — Phaedima nevertheless be great venture" — might

her father encouraged

truth.

art

"It will

a

risk,

I

will

be part of a communication between Mordecai and Esther. In the

Book

of Judith, Holofernes enquires about the Jews in a

way which

is

very similar to Atossa's questions about the Athenians in Aeschylus'

The Herodotean story of Intaphernes' wife, who prefers saving her brother to saving husband and children (III, 119), is genuinely Oriental, as Noldeke showed long ago. When Wilamowitz remarked that Judith could find a place in Parthenius' stories, he was Persae (230—265).

Persian, Greek,

i6

purposely one-sided.

thodox

as Judith.

novelistic

No

and Jewish Historiography

Greek heroine could be so pedantically

or-

But Wilamowitz recognised by implication that the

background was international.

V We

now

have

reached some positive and some negative

There are clearly Oriental elements both

in

Jewish and in Greek

common

toriography, but these are to be attributed to the

background of the Persian Empire rather than to ence.

If

uments

there

is

specific Persian influence,

— and perhaps

it is

results.

his-

cultural

specific Persian influ-

limited to the use of doc-

to the autobiographical style.

These elements of direct Oriental influence are interesting enough

in

themselves, but they are partly conjectural and were in any case never decisive for the future of cisive

is

the

cles of the

common

Greek and Jewish historiography. What

is

de-

reaction of Greeks and Jews to the royal chroni-

Eastern Empires.

In pre-exilic times the Jews

had had chronicles

of their kings.

The

author or authors of the present Books of Kings used them. But the

we read now are not comparable with the ordinary Royal Chronicles we know from Assyria and must assume to have ex-

Books

of Kings

isted in Persia.

The Books

of Kings are a record of events connected

with the relationship between Jehovah and the Hebrew nation as a whole. This of course applies even more to the definite postexilic products

which we

call the

Books

of Ezra

These are histories of a religious the author of the First

Book

of

and Nehemiah and Chronicles.

society.

Two

or three centuries later

Maccabees showed that

this tradition

was still alive among the Jews. In Greece chronicles played a modest part, if any, in the origins of Greek historiography. Books on individual nations and accounts of big wars almost certainly preceded local history. Thanks to Herodotus and of the political

and

religious historian

Thucydides the Greeks acquired what was going to remain acteristic historiography, the history of

one or more Starting

cities in their internal

from very

one big

their char-

historical event or of

upheavals and external warfare.

different presuppositions,

Greeks and Jews both

Persian, Greek,

and Jewish Historiography

17

developed a kind of history which was not a chronicle of individual kings or heroes, but a chronicle of a political community. Both the

Jewish and the Greek type of political history broke with the Persian or

more

generally Oriental type of history centred

of individual kings or heroes:

ating

and acting with

it

expressed the

clear purposes

life

on the performances of societies deliber-

under the leadership of far-seeing

men.

between the Jewish and the Greek

In the last resort the similarity

types of political history appears to be due not to the influence of Persia,

but to reaction against Persia. This

sixth, fifth,

and fourth centuries

B.C.

is

no reason

for surprise. In the

both the Greeks and the Jews

communal life in conscious reaction to the surroundwhich was the Persian Empire. It is a great compliment

reorganised their ing civilisation

to Persia that both did so without hating her. Indeed the Persians

helped the Jews to establish their theocracy. In the same

ready to replace tyranny by democracy in Greek that

cities

way they were when they felt

democracy was wanted. Deutero-Isaiah among the Jews and Aes-

chylus

among

ruling class

the Greeks recognised the ethical qualities of the Persian

and made

The reshaping sionally

it

a starting point for their religious meditation.

of political

life in

Greece after the Persian Wars occa-

took a turn that reminds us of parallel events

building of the wall of the Piraeus

opposed by external

rivals

was no

less

in

Judaea. The

important and no

less

than the rebuilding of the wall of Jerusalem.

The elimination of mixed marriages in Judaea reminds us of the decree of 451—450 which deprived of Athenian citizenship those unable to prove their dual Athenian parentage. Both in Judaea and in Greece an internationally minded society was being replaced by a narrower and consequently more communally minded society. Men who, like Ezra and Nehemiah, Miltiades and Themistocles, had had close contact with Persia were replaced by leaders more rooted in the local tradition. Jewish and Greek historiography expressed the outlook of groups emerging to new life away from the influence of Persia, but not without having experienced the ethical and religious quality of the Persian rulers, and not without having learned something of their technique in recording events.

Persian, Greek,

i8

and Jewish Historiography

VI The next question is: What were brew and Greek historians? Each Greek historian

the

main

of course different

is

differences

between He-

from the others, but

all

Greek historians deal with a limited subject which they consider important, and

are concerned with the reliability of the evidence they

all

are going to use.

Greek historians never claim

to

tell all

the facts of his-

tory from the origins of the world, and never believe that they can

without historia, without research. Each Greek historian

their tale

concerned with the qualitative importance of what he His task

tell

is

to preserve the

memory

is

going to

of important past events

is

say.

and

to

The choice of the evidence depend on various fac-

present the facts in a trustworthy and attractive way. subject and the examination of the tors

—including the

sias,

who

claimed to be a careful researcher, turns out to be a

point, however, in

intellectual integrity of the historian himself. Cte-

is

that he

had to claim to be

order to be respectable. There

The Greek historian almost tells have some relevance to portant

The

if

is

liar.

The

a trustworthy researcher

an important implication

in all this.

invariably thinks that the past events he the future.

The events would not be im-

they did not teach something to those

who

read about them.

story will provide an example, constitute a warning, point to a

likely pattern of future

developments in

human

affairs.

There

is

no

in-

dication in Greek historians that events inevitably recur at stated in-

The often-repeated notion that the Greek historians had a cyidea of time is a modern invention. There is only one Greek

tervals. clical

historian, cal events,

namely Polybius, but he does

constitutions

— and

it

who

applies the notion of cycle to histori-

only partially with regard to the evolution of

leaves ordinary military

and

political events

out of

the cycle. Even in the case of constitutions his theory has nothing of the rigour

What

and coherence attributed

to

it

by some modern interpreters.

the Greek attitude to history almost invariably implied

the historian not only

between them:

tells

in other

was

that

the facts, but tries to establish a connection

words he looks

and may be rather sophisticated

for causes

and consequences,

at that. In order to

sequence, without which no reliable explanation

is

have the correct possible, events

Persian, Greek,

and Jewish Historiography

must be dated. Since

cerned with chronology, though nological research

Greek historiography was con-

early stages

its

among

it

19

would be wrong

to assert that chro-

the Greeks served only the purpose of causal

explanation. Chronology was necessary also because antiquity or long

duration or both were criteria of importance. Thucydides was an ex-

was what

ception in admiring the Constitution of the Five Thousand, which

both recent and short-lived (VIII, 97). The ordinary Greek liked

what was very

lasted long or at least

On

the other

importance of

hand

the

ancient.

Greek historians were very conscious of the

literary presentation.

At

least

from Thucydides' time

onwards they knew that under certain circumstances an attractive literary form might become contrary to the interests of truth. More generally the Greek historian was always aware of being in danger of saying something that

was not

true or even probable.

Not

that he

what is probable and what

invariably cared to avoid the danger. But the choice between true is

and what

is

untrue, or at least between

what

is

improbable, was inherent in the profession of the historian as the

Greeks understood

Hebrew historians, as we read them in the Bible, the picture is different. Once upon a time the Hebrew historians selected special periods for their books: we know of a chronicle of Solomon's reign (I Kings 11, 41), but what we have in the Bible is a continuous story from the beginning of the world. If we follow the theory If

we

it.

pass to the

that the so-called Yahwist compiled the

first

draft of such a continuous

we must go back for it to the tenth or ninth century B.C. This is not to say that the men who put together the historical books of the Bible, as we have them, had no principle of selection. The selection was history,

that of a privileged line of events lation with Israel.

Thus

to the

which showed Jehovah's special

Hebrew

re-

historian historiography soon

became a narration of events from the beginning of the world such as no Greek historian ever conceived. The criteria of reliability were also different. Jews have always been supremely concerned with truth. The Hebrew God is the God of Truth. No Greek god, to the best of my knowledge,

is

called dXr]9Lv6g, truthful.

If

God

is

Truth, his followers

have the duty to preserve a truthful record of the events

showed

his presence.

Each generation

is

in

which

God

obliged to transmit a true ac-

20

Persian, Greek,

and Jewish Historiography

count of what happened to the next generation. Remembrance of the past

a reHgious duty for the Jews

is

Consequently reliabiUty

in

which was unknown

to the Greeks.

Jewish terms coincides with the truthful-

ness of the transmitters and with the ultimate truth of

God

in

whom

was supposed to be further an extent which was unknown to

the transmitters believe. Such reliability

supported by written records to

Greek

cities.

Flavius Josephus boasted

—not unreasonably—that the

Jews had better-organised public records than the Greeks I,

[c.

Apionem,

iff.).

What Josephus seems

to have missed

is

that the Greeks

had

criteria

by which to judge the relative merits of various versions which the Jew-

had

ish historians

same event

is

not.

The very

existence of different versions of the

something which, as

far as

I

remember,

is

not noticed as

such by the biblical historians. The distinction between various versions in the Bible studies. In

is

Hebrew

a

modern

application of Greek methods to biblical

historiography the collective

memory about

events could never be verified according to objective criteria.

priests

notoriously inclined — and pious frauds centuries — the Hebrew historian did not possess the

forged records all

If

past

priests are

to

in

critical instru-

ment

to discover the forgery. In so far as

critical one,

it is

modern historiography

is

a

a Greek, not a Jewish, product.

The Greeks liked history, but lives. The educated Greek turned

This, however, does not end the story.

never

made

it

the foundation of their

to rhetorical schools, to mystery cults, or to philosophy for guidance.

History was never an essential part of the (one suspects) for those this attitude of the

who

wrote

it.

life

of a

Greek

—not even

There may be many reasons for

Greeks, but surely an important factor was that his-

was so open to uncertainties, so unlikely to provide undisputed guidance. To the biblical Hebrew, history and religion were one. This

tory

identification, via the Gospels, has never ceased to be relevant to

Christian civilisation. Yet ation.

The Greeks never

we know

the paradox inherent in this situ-

lost interest in history

terest as part of their cultural inheritance.

and transmitted

this in-

whom

history

The Jews,

to

meant so much more, abandoned the practice of historiography almost entirely from the second to the sixteenth century and returned to historical study only

under the impact of the

Italian Renaissance.

Persian, Greek,

and Jewish Historiography

The question

of

21

how Greek historiography survived

tion will have to be faced in other contexts.

It

will be

Christianisa-

its

enough to suggest

here that Greek historiography survived because a distinction

troduced between sacred and profane history. But

our

What

last question:

then stopped

Hebrew

we want

was

in-

to ask as

historiography from de-

veloping any further and competing with Greek historiography?

VII

We there

must beware

was no lack

we mean

of

ready-made answers.

of research

among Jewish

In

more than one sense

historians.

If

by research

discovery of documents in archives or utilisation of earlier

we have seen that there was plenty of it. On the other hand if by research we mean care in depicting a contemporary political situation, the Books of Ezra and Nehemiah and the First Book of Machistories,

cabees are fine specimens. They give us a coherent picture of a political

development, and they allow us to see what actually happened. They

more than material for future historians. They are thought-out historiography. There was nothing wrong with this Jewish historiography except, quite simply, that it died out and did not become part of the Jewish way of life. The Jews did not go on writing history. They lost interest in historical research. Even the First Book of Maccabees ceased to be a Jewish book. Its original Hebrew text was allowed to fade out, and the Greek translation was preserved by the Christians. The appearance of the Book of Daniel in the Jewish canon would call for many a comment. But one is enough for my purpose. Fantastic specare

ulations about historical developments are not necessarily contrary to the interest of historical studies.

They

offer a

scheme

for the coordi-

nation of historical events. They are a constant challenge to the learned

who

pile

up the

facts

without being able to organise them. Even today

there are professors of history ful

who would

get inspiration

from a care-

reading of Daniel. But any principle of coordination of the facts

useful only

Daniel

is

if

the facts are available.

useful.

The

facts

necessary to explain here

Where

history

is

studied, even

were available to the Christians.

what an important part

the

is

Book

It is

un-

of Daniel

played in Christian philosophy of history from Clement of Alexandria

22

and Jewish Historiography

Persian, Greek,

The

to Hegel. tradition

Our form:

is

uselessness or near uselessness of Daniel in the Jewish

due to the absence of

historical research

the Jews.

question, therefore, can be reformulated in a slightly different

Why did the Jews

treated in the

Books

The reality which history is

lose interest in historical research?

The very way

of this change cannot be doubted.

bit,

among

in

of Daniel, Esther, Judith, and, one could add. To-

shows that by the second century

was

B.C. the interest in history

at

The First Book of Maccabees, which was written about ICQ B.C., was probably already an exceptional production. Some historical books were certainly written in Hebrew or Aramaic even later. Flavius Josephus wrote one in Aramaic before turning into a Greek historian. But the gap between the disappearance of the Aramaic Josephus and the appearance of the so-called Josippon in Italy in a very

low

level.

the tenth century it

was not

is

enormous. Indeed the gap extends further because

Jews began to display Nothing can fill the gap neither

until the sixteenth century that Italian

a serious interest in Jewish history.

—

the minute compilation of the Megillath Ta'anit nor the Seder

Kabbah, nor indeed the which was written

in

so-called

'Olam

Liber antiquitatum biblicarum,

Hebrew, perhaps

in the first century a.d.,

but

is

now

only preserved in a later translation for Christian use. Other writ-

ings,

such as the Megillath Antiochos, which

is

without any historical

value, do not even deserve to be taken into consideration in this con-

The only type of historical tradition in which the Jews really remained interested (apart from biblical events) was the relation of the various rabbis to their predecessors: the Seder Tannaim Wa-Amoraim is a late (ninth century), but fairly typical, example of what we could call history of the transmission of learning. It was observed by Moritz text.

Steinschneider that the medieval Jews took an interest in

Arabic culture

—mathematics, philosophy,

declares historical

The disappearance

books

to be a

of the Jewish state

is

was in and there

tory cause. Jewish historiography

end of the Jewish

state,

historiography should end

medicine, poetry

— except

mere waste of time.

the end of Jewish historiography, though

fore the

aspects of

an eloquent passage by Maimonides,

history. Steinschneider quotes

who

all

when

no it

sufficient

was

explanation of

certainly a contribu-

a critical condition even beis

political

which independence ends. The

no law

of nature by

and Jewish Historiography

Persian, Greek,

Greeks did not lose interest of

23

when

in history

they

Rome. Armenian historiography outHved

became

the subjects

the independence of Ar-

menia; and Maronite historiography developed in conditions of political subjection.

The answer we can give to our question is perhaps a double one. On the one hand the postbiblical Jews really thought they had in the Bible all

the history that mattered: superevalution of a certain type of history

implied undervaluation of

all

whole development of Judaism the Law, the Torah.

The

other events.

"God

and no

which the Jews came to attach to general historiography. "There is no

significance

Torah"

later in the

himself

sits

hand the

the other

something unhistorical, eternal,

led to

the Torah killed their interest in earlier

On

[Fes.

we

6 b). Indeed, as

and studies the Torah" [Ab. Zarah

know,

all

Daily ac-

3 b).

quaintance with the Eternal neither requires nor admits of historical explanations. Life, as regulated by the Torah, presented that formidable simplicity

man famous

which

I

for piety

was

and learning among

nothing to explain and

Law day and

night.

also regular in

able to observe in

still

little

its effects.

is

There

grandfather, a

Italian Jews.

to reveal to the

The Torah

my

man who

meditated the

not only permanent in is

History had

its

something paradoxical

value, but in the fact

—

two of the best writers of autobiography in Antiquity Ezra and Nehemiah organised Judaism in such a way as to make history unnecessary. Their fragmentary memoirs have for us the fascination of representing the last steps of a journey towards a world where even history a contrario, prophecy, ceases to count, and only the invariable that

—

obedience to the Torah remains meaningful.

While the Jewish conception of the torical research, the

led to indifference to his-

Greek conception of law became an inexhaustible

source for historical research in the that historiography developed in the of Ionian

Law

century B.C.

fifth fifth

It is

century in the

no chance

full

maturity

and Attic democracy. The victory of democracy was the

tory for social mobility and reform: tional choice.

It

was

sharpened the interest in

tutional changes, institutions

it

it

invited

the victory for free

political theories

and

vic-

and

ra-

consti-

comparison between Greek and non-Greek

and between the various types of Greek

ern scholars are inclined to underrate the

amount

institutions.

Mod-

of thought that

went

Persian, Greek,

24

and Jewish Historiography

into the practical details of constitutional reforms. Because the sixth

and

fifth

centuries were full of constitutional schemes

and

devices, con-

temporary historians were made aware of the existing variety of

and

institutions

ical

whose names ion for which cussion

must have existed

are lost

centuries. In creating

Many

social customs.

in

polit-

constitutional theorists

Greece

in the sixth

and

fifth

democracy they also created that climate of opin-

Nomos

—Law—became the object of

was so far-reaching

as to involve a poet like

The disPindar and a dochistoria.

tor like Hippocrates, not to speak of the historian Herodotus.

Greek Law, Nomos, was not only compatible with search but, as understood

in the fifth century,

one of the chief ingredients of history writing. definitely

and

later,

The Law

historical re-

proved to be

of the

Jews was

beyond History.

VIII Jewish historiography because

Greek language

is

no exception, simply

belongs to Hellenistic, not to Jewish, civilisation. All the na-

it

tions that

in the

came

into contact with the Greeks in the Hellenistic age (and

even before) produced books in Greek about their national history.

They did so

partly because the Greeks taught

way through the medium wanted to make themselves

them

to see themselves

in a different

of Hellenic historia, partly be-

cause they

respectable before Greek eyes.

In any case they paid their tribute to an alien civilisation. Jewish writers

who

wrote

in

Greek about Jewish

history, or indeed

any other

his-

They were making an effort to think in Greek according to Greek categories. The Romans went beyond this stage because they very soon stopped writing in Greek and began to produce historical works in Latin. As a result Greek historiography became part of Latin culture. Sallust, Livy, Tacitus, and Ammianus Martory,

cannot be judged

cellinus

were the consequences. Today we write history

tive languages,

their

differently.

because the

example that Greek

Romans broke

historia could be

the taboo

done

in

our respec-

and showed by

in other languages.

As

know, neither the Eyptians nor the Babylonians nor the Jews ever envisaged that the taboo could be broken. Few or none of them far as

I

wrote the Greek type of history either

in

Egyptian or in Babylonian or

Persian, Greek,

in

and Jewish Historiography

Hebrew. For

among the

this

2-5

reason the Jews, unhke the Romans, must be put

nations which did not assimilate Greek historiography. His-

toriography of the Greek type never became a recognised part of Jewish hfe.

There

is,

however, an important difference between Jews on the one

hand and Egyptians or Babylonians on the other. Individual Egyptians or Babylonians acquired the Greek language and could pass for Greeks. But there was never a recognisable variety of Greek civilisation characterised by the fact that

it

was

the product of Greek-speaking

Egyptians or Babylonians. By contrast there was a distinctive brand of

Hellenism which was Jewish Hellenism. There were entire communities

which, even though they considered themselves Jews and practised

the Jewish religion, spoke Greek, thought in Greek,

any Hebrew or Aramaic. For at

mained the of

and knew hardly

least seven or eight centuries

Greek

re-

The phenomenon more important and

alternative cultural language of the Jews.

Jews writing history

in

Greek

is

therefore far

complicated than the sporadic appearance of Egyptians and Babylon-

own

ians or Persians writing their

the Jews

who

wrote history

from pagans. The

Sicilian

in

Jew

bellions of the slaves in Sicily

national history in Greek.

Greek were not

Some

easily distinguishable

Caecilius of Calacte wrote about the re-

and about the theory of history

bers of the educated society of the early

who wrote

first

century a.d.

man-

in a

ner acceptable to Dionysius of Halicarnassus and to other pagan of the third century B.C.

of

mem-

A Demetrius

and an Eupolemus of the second century

B.C.,

about Jewish history, were taken to be pagans by Josephus.

Later Eusebius realised,

we do not know how,

doubt some Jews disguised themselves effective in their

propaganda

as

that they were Jews.

pagans

in

No

order to be more

— and some interpolated authentic pagan

works, such as those by Manetho and Hecataeus of Abdera,

in

order

comments by pagans. Other Jews were genuine syncretists who mixed pagan and Jewish elements freely. Artapanus attributed the introduction of Egyptian cults to Moses, and Cleodemus made Hercules the companion of three sons of Abraham. We have no to counteract hostile

reason to suspect ulterior motives. Others were pious Jews

thought about Jewish history

in a

Greek

literary style,

who

but with few

concessions to Greek religious ideas. Jason of Gyrene, whose

work on

26 the

Persian, Greek,

Maccabean

rebellion

is

summarised

and Jewish Historiography

in the

Second Book of Mac-

cabees, wrote in the tragic style of Hellenistic historiography.

Bickerman showed

in his great little

As

Elias

book on Der Gott der Makka-

was more traditional in religious outlook than the author of the Hebrew First Book of Maccabees. He kept to the principle that the fortunes and misfortunes of the Jews entirely depended on their observance of the Law. The author of the First Book of Maccabees was determined to blame the persecutions on the Seleucids. But it would be wrong to regard even Jason as a man who simply presented Jewish ideas in Greek guise. Jason looked upon the Maccabean victory as the fruit of martyrdom. He was the first historian to make martyrdom the centre of his exposition. The importance of his discovery is shown by the place of the Maccabean martyrs in the Christian tradition. The origin of the notion of martyrdom is a notorious subject for controversy. At least it can be said that it was not an exclusively Hebrew notion. Though the Stoic theory of martyrdom is not expounded at length in our sources before Epictetus, Socrates had been the prototype of the philosophic martyr for centuries. The Second Book of Maccabees is at the crossroads between Jewish and Greek thought. Philo is another historian who cannot be classified either as Greek or as Jew. Only part of his account of contemporary events in Alexandria and Rome has survived, and it is not easy to form an idea of what he wanted to prove. But he operated with elaborate notions, such as those of Pronoia, Arete, and Palinodia, which are not easily translatable into Hebrew. As for Josephus, he was not primarily writing for Hellenised Jews. He was writing for pagans. He wanted to present Jewish history to educated Greek readers and to account for the Jewish war in a way which would be a credit to anyone, including himself and excluding a minority of Jewish fanatics. Nobody to my knowledge has yet explained satisfactorily why and how that strange concoction of the Second Book of Maccabees, of Josephus, and of other writings which we call the Hebrew Josippon came into being in the tenth cenbder, Jason

tury and qualified as popular light reading in later centuries. there

was

in the ninth

and tenth centuries a

in history

among the Jews.

about the

fate of the ten lost tribes

It

No

doubt

certain revival of interest

began perhaps with a misguided curiosity

which the notorious Eldad-Hadani

Persian, Greek,

and Jewish Historiography

Much

exploited.

exploration

27

needed

is

New

mediaeval Jewish historiography.

obscure episodes of

in these

discoveries are not, however,

obvious conclusion that neither

likely to disprove the

II

Maccabees,

nor Philo, nor Josephus were ever reabsorbed into the Jewish tradition.

They remained operative only not in form,

is

conception of history

is

spirit

if

secutorum.

More

in

behind the Christian Acta Martyrum. Philo's related to that of Lactantius'

generally, Philo

Platonists. Finally,

Maccabees,

in Christian learning. II

Josephus

is

De Mortibus

Per-

the predecessor of the Christian

is

one of the writers without

whom

Eu-

would not have been able to invent Ecclesiastical History. Orthodox Judaism was not impervious to Greek influences. The

sebius

very organisation of traditional Jewish education

inconceivable

is

without the example of the Greek paideia. But history never became part of Jewish education.

commentator

The Jewish learned man was

traditionally a

of sacred texts, not a historian. Jewish scholars did not

begin to take an interest in the critical reexamination of the Jewish past

was a by-product

until the sixteenth century. This

naissance.

To the extent that the

Greek philology and

name

humanists used the methods of

history, Jewish scholars also reestablished contact

with Greek historical thought. recall the

Italian

I

come almost

of Azariah de' Rossi, the scholar

ample of the application of Renaissance

Greek

critical

methods,

Judaism by the route of

if

Italy.

when I from Mantua who

to family history

gave in the Me^or ^Enayim (Light of the Eyes) the history.

of the Italian Re-

first

impressive ex-

methods to Jewish were coming back to

historical

nothing

else,

The next

step

was

the

Tractatus

Theologicus-Politicus by Spinoza.

Spinoza went back to the fundamental principles of Greek historical research in the sense that he treated biblical history as ordinary history in the

Greek manner. Furthermore,

if it is

generally true that Renais-

sance scholars soon went far beyond what Greek scholars had been able to

do

in the historical interpretation of ancient texts, this

ticularly true of Spinoza. After all he

knowledge of the erations his

Bible,

was able

to rely

is

par-

on the intimate

and on the sharp observation of details, of gen-

and generations of Hebrew scholars. He himself was aware of

debt to Ibn Ezra. Yet not even Spinoza

was

truly a historian of Judaism.

When

he said

28

and Jewish Historiography

Persian, Greek,

methodum

"dico

interpretandi Scripturam

haud

terpretandi naturam" {Tract. TheoL Pol. 7. the principles of free enquiry which possible. But he

was

6),

differre a

methodo

in-

he certainly reasserted

had made Greek historiography

interested in eternal truths, not in historical

was part of his philosophy, not a contribution to a history of the Jews. He was perhaps none the worse for that; but the encounter between Spinozism and historical research was a later development which would have surprised Spinoza himself. events. His criticism of the Bible

Unlike the Jews the Christians maintained or rather, after an interval,

recaptured an interest in history. The expectation of the end of the

world became much more pressing among the Christians than among the Jews and resulted in the constant scrutiny of events as portents.

Apocalyptic thinking was a stimulus to historical observation. Fur-

thermore

— and

this

was

decisive

—the conversion of Constantine im-

plied the reconciUation of the majority of the Christian leaders with

the

Roman Empire

to the

Church

in

(especially in the East)

mundane

affairs.

What

and gave

a precise place

Christian historians did in

order to justify and clarify these developments will be the subject matter of

my

Here

last lecture.

it

will be

enough

to point out that by the

time Christian historiography began in earnest in the third and fourth centuries a.d., Jewish historiography in

mote

past:

and there had been no

after Flavins Josephus.

Hebrew was

influential

a thing of the re-

Jewish historian in Greek

Greek pagan historiography was

and challenging. Christian

ecclesiastical historians,

far

more

vital

though inevitably

drawing on Daniel and Josephus, ultimately adopted the methods of

pagan historiography historiography.

—but

not, as

we

shall see, of

Greek

political

CHAPTER TWO

The Herodotean and the Thucydidean Tradition

I I

hope that

though

I

am

my

first

chapter will at least have

capable of any amount of nonsense,

I

made

am

it

not so perverse

as to

deny that the Greeks knew what history was about.

"The

first

is

that

in

thing to

it is,

remember about

the

Greek

clear that,

When

The Sense of History

Greek and Shakespearean Drama, Columbia, N.Y., i960, critic

read

historical consciousness

in essence, unhistorical" (T. F. Driver,

myself what the

I

19),

I

ask

meant. The notion that the Greek mind was un-

historical has, of course, a respectable pedigree.

Collingwood and Reinhold Niebuhr to Hegel.

It

It is

goes back through fashionable

among

theologians because they are naturally inclined to think that Christianpresents a

ity

new and

Thus we hear that

better departure in the understanding of history.

minded because

the Greeks were not historically

they thought in terms of regular or recurrent patterns, of natural laws, of timeless substance,

and so on. Even Greek pessimism

is

taken to be

a proof that the Greeks were incapable of understanding history.

Much the

of the

argument

is

founded upon vague generalisations about

Greek Mind which betray more

familiarity with Pythagoras, Plato,

and Zeno the Stoic than with Herodotus, Thucydides, and Polybius.

If

you identify Plato with the Greek Mind (whatever that may mean), you

will

In the

conclude that the Greek

Mind was not

same way you might conclude

terested in history because Descartes

that the French

was

trary generalisation to maintain that Plato tative of

Greek

civilisation

interested in history.

a

Mind

Frenchman.

is

than Herodotus.

a

more It

is

is

It is

not

in-

an arbi-

typical represen-

another arbitrary

29

The Herodotean and the Thucydidean Tradition

30

generalisation to maintain that

human

lieved in regular cycles of

Theopompus,

all

the

Greek and

events:

and Tacitus.

Livy, Arrian,

Roman historians

be-

Herodotus did not, nor did It is

yet a further arbitrary

generalisation to maintain that a Christian historian will write better history than a

rodotus sible

is

pagan historian simply because he

better than any mediaeval historian

exception of Ibn Khaldun

is

a Christian.

know

I

He-

of with the pos-

—who was not a Christian and believed

in circular processes of history.

The

real question

is

not whether the

Greeks were historically minded, but about the types of history they

wrote and transmitted to

us.

go back to the time when

At the

Men ical

risk of naivety

I

begin with political history, but

political history

we must remind

when they want framework. Any registration is write history

had not

I

must

yet been invented.

ourselves of

some

basic facts.

to record events with a chronolog-

and though a selection

a selection,

of facts does not necessarily imply principles of interpretation, very

often

does. Events

it

may be chosen

for registration because they either

explain a change or point to a moral or indicate a recurrent pattern.

Conservation of the memories of the past, a chronological framework,

and an interpretation of the events are elements of historiography to be found

many

in

century

is

A

civilisations.

Mongolian chronicler

more eloquent about

of the eighteenth

these aspects of history writing than

common man does not know his origins, he is like a mad ape. He who does not know his great and right family connections is like an outsize dragon. He who does not know the cirany Greek historian:

"If the

cumstances and the course of actions of father

is

like a

man who,

throws them into

What

I

think

this

is

his

noble father and grand-

having prepared sorrow for his children,

world."

typically

recording of events, that

is,

Greek

is

the critical attitude towards the

the development of critical

methods en-

abling us to distinguish between facts and fancies. To the best of

knowledge no historiography it

developed these

critical

earlier

my

than the Greek or independent of

methods; and

we have

inherited the

Greek

methods.

But the Greek-speaking populations

who

invaded what

we

call

Greece in the second millennium B.C. were not provided with a natural gift for historical criticism. Historical criticism

begins in Greece only

The Herodotean and the Thucydidean Tradition

31

would be misleading to suggest that Homer or Hesiod contributed to the making of what is specific in Greek historiography. No doubt tales like those of Homer were models in the sixth

century B.C., and

for historical narration.

traordinary ulations

They indicated

gift for recalling

had been

it

a favourite

On

hand genealogical specgame with the Greeks at least since He-

it.

the other

and probably before him. Thinking

siod,

and an ex-

interest in the past

an arche, of a

in terms of

beginning and a development, seems to have been a constant feature of

Greek thought since the beginning.

which

terious compositions

chaic

— such

poem on

as the

Semonides of Amorgos find

some

Greek

in

If

those mys-

Hellenistic times circulated as

the early history of

Samos

—we

(early sixth century?)

further connection between

historians.

we knew more about

Homer and

ar-

attributed to

should probably

the style of the early

But there was no continuity of historical thought

from Hesiod to Hecataeus. At some point between them a revolution happened.

One

part of the revolution

was

political:

it

was

the discov-

human

ery of the importance of law as a factor of differentiation in

The other part

cieties.

of the revolution

lion against tradition, the search for rise of

doubt as an

One name

is

new

was philosophical:

so-

the rebel-

principles of explanation, the

intellectual stimulus to

new

discoveries.

seldom mentioned when the origins of Greek histo-

riography are studied: the rebel genius of Xenophanes.

He

refused to

believe in the traditional gods, he emphasised the uncertainty of hu-

man knowledge and

human conceptions. He was inand inventions. He is said to have written poems

the relativity of

terested in discoveries

about the foundations of Colophon and about the colonisation of Elea: but the

latter at least

may be

a forgery.

He

certainly tried to

guesses about the past of the earth by studying

dinary fragment

and

we

fossils. In

read: "Shells are found inland,

and

make

an extraor-

in the

moun-

fish

and

of a seaweed has been found, while an impression of a bay leaf

was

tains,

found

in the quarries in Syracuse ...

in Paros in the

marine objects"

(fr.

an impression of a

depth of the rock, and

in

flat

shapes of

all

187 Kirk-Raven). Thucydides adopted a method

singularly reminiscent of this study of fossils

surviving customs of past ages in Greece.

poem

Malta

when he examined

Xenophanes implies

that he has already lived ninety-two years. His

life

the in a

must have ex-

The Herodotean and the Thucydidean Tradition

32

tended from about 560 to about 470: the century

in

which Hecataeus

reached maturity and Herodotus was a boy.

Xenophanes does not seem to have undertaken any systematic revision of the Greek historical tradition or to have formulated any criterion about

validity. Yet

its

by questioning the traditional opinions

about the gods, he made inevitable the examination of that part of

Greek history which was the borderland between gods and men. Hecataeus, the subtle and ruthless Milesian

who

reluctantly took a lead-

ing part in the Ionian rebellion between 500 and that examination.

genealogies of the

494

B.C.,

undertook

He wrote about the geography of the earth and the Greeks. He used the results of extensive research in

Oriental lands, and especially in Phoenicia and Egypt, to

show

that

Greek myths were untenable because they went against established facts of Oriental chronology.

ported by Herodotus

(II,

The best-known

143).

He

story about

him

is re-

boasted to the priests of an Egyp-

tian temple that he could count sixteen ancestors, and the sixteenth

was

a god.

That amounted

500 Hecateaus duce

tions before

sors

—

B.C.

The answer

to intro-

their predeces-

at the beginning.

own

family

meeting the challenge of the Egyptian

replied that evidently the gods

in direct contact with the in

was

wished to adhere to the tradition of his

would have no priests. He would have was

345 generations of

and no trace of god or hero

difficulty in

taeus

of the Egyptian priests

to the images of

priests after priests,

A man who

to putting the heroic age sixteen genera-

had kept longer

Greeks than with the Egyptians. But Heca-

no such mood. The lesson he derived

is

stated in the in-

troduction to one of his two works

—the Genealogies. In words which

have not yet

2,500 years he proclaimed:

lost their force after

cataeus will say

what

I

"I

He-

think to be the truth; the stories of the Greeks

many and ridiculous." The new attitude towards tradition is plain. One has simply to compare it with that of Hesiod. Hesiod knew that

are

he was

fallible.

He

sang what the Muses told him, and he was aware

Muses did not always checking the inspiration he had

that the

tell

the truth. But he

had no way of

received from them.

Hecataeus did find an objective criterion for a choice between

and

fancies.

He was no

to foreign evidence.

longer at the mercy of the Muses.

By comparison with

the

non-Greek

He

facts

turned

tradition,

The Herodotean and the Thucydidean Tradition

Greek tradition was shown

33

The enlargement

to be "ridiculous."

of the

geographical horizon resulted also in an extension of the chronological

framework of ments of the plicity of

lous."

tradition, with disastrous results for the

He

Hecataeus pointedly mentioned the multi-

past. Besides,

Greek

tales.

The Greek "logoi" were "many" and

So much,

think,

I

see

is fairly

what was Hecataeus' next

Greek gods

latter case did

their

own

absurdity.

But the extant fragments do not

clear.

step.

Greek gods and heroes were a

least certain

the

"ridicu-

seems to imply that the Greek traditions, there being so

many, contradicted each other and added to

low us to

Greek measure-

Did he conclude that

fiction?

Or

al-

at

did he consign

to the chronological level of the Egyptian gods? In the

he suggest that the Greeks established their chronology

human namesakes of the gods and the real gods? The answer depends to a very large extent on how much of Hecataeus we are prepared to find in Herodotus. Herodotus certainly distinguished in Book II a Hercules who was a god from a later Hercules who was a hero. And there are various good reasons for believing that when he wrote Book II about Egypt he was under the on the

basis of a confusion

spell of his predecessor.

between

But

it is

later

obviously hazardous to ascribe to He-

cataeus those opinions in Herodotus'

Book

II

which look strongly

ra-

The fragments we can confidently attribute to Hecataeus only suggest that he saw nothing superhuman in the ordinary tales about Hercules. Other fragments show the same tendency to criticise tradition by doing away with the dog Cerberus and by reducing in number the sons of Aegyptus. The limits and methods of this rationtionalistic.

myths are not easy

alisation of the

taeus reported tradition and then lievable, yet this

is

We

shall

one case

at least

Heca-

commented: "Ridiculous and unbe-

what they say"

case he did not feel able to offer

to see. In

328 Jacoby). Apparently in this an alternative version of his own. (fr.

be wise not to try to force the evidence for Hecataeus into

some coherent

pattern.

We

do not know whether he was prepared

deny the existence of the gods of Greek

seem to have run

in that direction.

usual experiences and

were not adduced his criticism

in

He

what we should

religion,

though

his

to

thoughts

did not refuse credence to uncall miracles, as

long as they

support of traditional myths. The general trend of

seems to have been to attribute to

men what

tradition at-

The Herodotean and the Thucydidean Tradition

34 tributed to gods.

The

real

importance of Hecataeus

is

not in the indi-

vidual interpretations he propounded but in the discovery that a sys-

tematic criticism of historical tradition

and that a comparison between

is

both possible and desirable,

different national traditions helps to

establish the truth.

The situation in w^hich he lived compelled him paradoxically to become a leader of the Ionian rebellion against the Persians; but he never ceased to be a philo-barbaros. Heraclitus disliked him perhaps for the same reason that Hegel disliked B. G. Niebuhr. The conservative thinker had little sympathy w^ith the empirical researcher of a more liberal outlook. Hecataeus, by his erudition, made nonsense of the claims of

Greek

aristocrats like Heraclitus to be descendants of gods.

Heca-

taeus' admiration for the barbarians had political undertones,

just as

there were political undertones in Niebuhr's admiration for the

Roman

peasants.

II

Hecataeus acted

in the Ionian rebellion,

believe that he wrote about

it.

The

but

we have no

reason to

idea of extending historical

criti-

cism from the remote past to the recent past does not seem to have oc-

man who knows of a man who pre-

curred to him. His type of analysis was not that of a the difficulties of collecting the evidence, but that

supposes the evidence to be known. tales of the

He

started by declaring that the

Greeks were many and ridiculous. His successor Herodotus

was his purpose to preserve from decay the recollection of what men had done and to prevent the great and marvellous actions of the Greeks and of the barbarians from forgoing their due tribute of glory. Like every other Greek, Herodotus was conbegan with the declaration that

it

cerned with the ephemeral character of other Greeks he believed that perfect)

remedy man had

memory

human

actions. Like

of past deeds

at his disposal against his

programme appears

was

own

many

the only (immortality.

At

Homeric one; indeed without Homer, Herodotus could never have conceived it. Yet the historian was on his guard. He knew that his task was twofold: to preserve tradition was necessary, but to find out the truth about it was equally desirable. first

sight the

to be a

The Herodotean and the Thucydidean Tradition

He

35

realised that poets sing of events that never

happened, and he was

not prepared to bestow immortaUty on what had never come into being.

The old theory that Herodotus set out as a geographer in Hecataeus' first manner and only slowly developed the idea of writing a history of the Persian Wars still seems to me plausible. At least it emphasises the undoubted fact that a history of the Persian Wars was something Herodotus had to discover for himself, while descriptions of foreign countries existed before him. But the development of Herodotus

important to us than

his final stand. Ultimately

in writing.

the scope of his criticism to fairly recent,

less

Herodotus determined

and traditions that

to take responsibility for the registration of events

had not yet been recorded

is

At the same time, he extended

examine both the very ancient and the

both the Greek and the foreign. The implications of his

decision were enormous.

The instrument of criticism used by Hecataeus had never been very precise. Used as it was by Herodotus for all sorts of traditions, it was bound to become even less precise. The simple expedient of comparison was hardly adequate when Herodotus came to question the validity both of the Greek and of the non-Greek traditions. Nor did he find it

so easy to reduce the traditional tales to ordinary

human terms when

he had to face foreign myths. Besides, the burning

fire

of incredulity

was absent in him. He refrained from saying certain things because it would have been offensive to the gods to say them (II, 3; 61). In one case he added: "Having said so much may I incur no displeasure of either

god or hero"

his dislike of

(II,

45). His religious scruples

were

in

tune with

any utterance that would give away inner feelings or

would seem to be ostentatiously in favour of one side against the other. With characteristic diffidence and elaborate precautions he stated that Athens had saved Greece during the Persian Wars (VII, 139). In other arguments, both religious and profane, he admitted that he spoke only because impelled to do so by the trend of his discourse 99).

It is

difficult to

imagine a

man more

from Hecataeus than Herodotus.

It is

Halicarnassus reflected the soberer

Wars.

If

(II,

65; VII, 96,

temperamentally different

arguable that the historian from

mood

of Greece after the Persian

he wrote mainly in Athens, Sophocles,

who was

his friend.

The Herodotean and the Thucydidean Tradition

36

may have

taught him something about the mysterious ways of gods

'

and the vain pretences of men. Herodotus' reactions to the stories he heard are unpredictable, unsystematic, and partly self-contradictory.

He cannot

believe that the

Neuri became w^olves once a year, though the Greeks of Scythia this

under oath

(IV, 105).

Nor does

he believe that Scyllias of Scion

sw^am eighty stages under water to desert to the Greeks (VIII, he can sus'

tell

the story of

state

how Alcmeon

But

8).

himself with gold at Croe-

filled

expense without interposing a word of caution (VI, 125). In cer-

tain cases he decides to indicate that there

to his tale.

He

of Cambyses'

gives both the better

march through

was more than one version

and the worse versions of a

the Syrian desert,

ing details about the death of Poly crates

and he hints 122).

(III,

He

detail

at conflict-

also tells at

length both the Sybarite and the Crotoniate versions of Dorieus' inter-

vention in the affairs of the Italian Greeks reader to judge which

is

(V,

preferable. But to

44—45) and

all

leaves the

appearances he

not

is

consistent in reporting conflicting versions.

we had to assess Herodotus simply as a follower of Hecataeus' method, we should have to consider him inferior to his master. There are modern critics who have reached this conclusion. But Herodotus If

clearly goes

beyond Hecataeus both

the matter of interests.

mained is

The two

in the

matter of principles and in

principles to

which Herodotus

consistently faithful are not to be found in Hecataeus.

the duty to give priority to recording over criticising.

one occasion: "For myself, though

which

is

told me, to believe

it is

saying hold good for the whole of

it

be

none

my

my

As he

business to set

at all of

my

The

history" (VII, 152).

first

says

down

business;

re-

let

on

that

that

The second

what he has seen with his own eyes from what he has heard: "Thus far all I have said is the outcome of my own sight and judgment and inquiry. Henceforth I will record Egyptian chronicles, according to that which I have heard, adding thereto somewhat of what I myself have seen" (II, 99). In making this distinction between what he has seen and what he has heard, Herodotus is precise principle

is

the separation of

sometimes to the point of pedantry. For instance, he

tells

us that

when

he visited the labyrinth near Lake Moeris he was allowed to see the upper chambers, but not the lower chambers

(II,

148), In other cases.

I

|

The Herodotean and the Thucydidean Tradition

when he

reports from

somebody

else's

37

account, he takes trouble to in-

dicate the degree of reliability of his informants. to Heliopolis because the local priests

He went

—XoyLobxaxoL— among the Egyptians

way

(II,

3).

He

also

to state that a certain report appears to him very reliable. The em-

phasis on the trustworthiness of his information

Now, when Herodotus took mary facts

duty, he

was

in fact

book on

one of the most

the recording of tradition as his pri-

doing something more than simply saving

from oblivion. He was guiding

ploration of the

is

method.

characteristic features of Herodotus' critical

his

the

had the reputation of being the

most competent likes

all

unknown and

historical research

towards the ex-

of the forgotten. Hecataeus'

genealogies, as far as

it is

known

to us,

method

in

was mainly con-

cerned with criticism of the known. Herodotus went to foreign coun-

same time, he developed a distinction between things seen and things heard that was essential to the new type of exploration. Unlike Hecataeus he was no longer primarily tries to

discover historical events. At the

what he heard but a discoverer of new facts. Therefore he indicate which of the reports he could vouch for. The task of

a judge of

had to

preserving traditions implied the aim of discovering

new methodical approach

gether entailed a

in

new

facts.

which the

Both

to-

reliability of

evidence mattered more than rational evaluation of probabilities. Hecataeus' ally

method was not discarded, though Herodotus was occasion-

impatient with his predecessor. But for the purpose of establishing

the truth the cross-examination of witnesses

than the rational justification of a theory.

Book IV

those chapters of

A

became more important

characteristic

which Herodotus

in

example are Hecataeus'

criticises

theory about the Hyperboreans with unusual sarcasm (IV, of the criticism

is

on the ordinary

levels of probability, as

pect from a pupil of Hecataeus. But the

main

3 iff.).

Part

we would

line of the

ex-

argument

is

an examination of the authority of the various witnesses.

By combining enquiry with

criticism of the evidence,

Herodotus ex-

tended the limits of historical research to embrace the greater part of the

world

came

a

as then

known.

major problem.

In such a

He had

complex enquiry chronology be-

to build

up a chronological framework

capable of including several different national traditions which had never been brought together before and for which there was no com-

The Herodotean and the Thucydidean Tradition

38

mon measure of time. It is the merit of Professor H. Strasburger to have shown how skilfully and unassumingly Herodotus created his chronology.

By implying

Athens

in the sixth year after the

in VIII, 51, i, that Kalliades

death of Darius,

was

when Xerxes went

to Greece, he constructed the bridge between Oriental

nology that

still

to collect the evidence

records were not accessible or did not

Herodotus was deprived of

documents by

his

In Greece written

written

for the Eastern coun-

direct access to chronicles

documents were few and and

clear that

It is

documents

tain

As

exist.

when

and other

ignorance both of the languages and of their scripts.

in the archives of temples

special favour.

and Greek chro-

holds good after 2,400 years.

The other problem was how tries,

the archon in

for the

out of a

cities,

most part concealed

Herodotus must have had access to

Greek concerning Persian taxation

in

and the Persian ships

sian royal road (V, 52),

reach except by

visitor's

for

him by

cer-

89), the Per-

(VII, 89; VIII, 66; VIII,

130). For a few inscriptions in hieroglyphics

pended on translations provided

(III,

and cuneiform he de-

local guides

and

interpret-

The best known examples are the inscriptions of the pyramids (II, 125) and those of Sesostris (II, 102). As for the Greeks, Hecataeus is

ers.

the only contemporary prose writer

have used. Aeschylus

took over some of the past.

is

the only contemporary poet

facts. All the

He knew

so

whom we know

other literary quotations

many

oracles that one

may

Herodotus to

from

whom

he

come from poets suspect he found

them already collected together in a book. The Greek chronicles and memoirs which are put forward from time to time as sources of Herodotus have never been more than vague shadows: the Delphic chronicle once advocated by Wilamowitz and the memoirs of Dikaios are

now

Greek inscriptions Herodotus read

discredited.

though one can be letters"

He

in

some doubt

as to

what he made

for

of the

himself,

"Cadmean

he saw in the temple of the Ismenian Apollo at Thebes

(V, 59).

quotes only twelve Greek inscriptions and another dozen foreign

documents. zene

is

If

the so-called decree of Themistocles discovered at Troe-

authentic,

it is

rodotus never saw.

a splendid

He

only half the Athenian

did not fleet

example of the kind of document He-

know

was meant

that,

according to this decree,

to face the Persians at the Ar-

temisium. Furthermore, he puts the decision to evacuate Athens after

The Herodotean and the Thucydidean Tradition

39

the battle of the Artemisium, whereas the decree

was taken before

it.

But perhaps he did not

cause the decree did not yet exist

Altogether

it

know the wrote.

mainly on oral evidence and that his very method than on written evidence.

He mentions many

rests

on

pyrus son of Megabyzus,

and

who

for instance,

who

name

in its infancy.

still

is

are the

what he gleaned from Zo-

work

(III,

i6o).

The study

whereby Herodotus collected and organised

during his travels

oral rather

deserted from the Persians to Athens

received special mention in his

the technique

his story

of his informants, but

does not give the impression that those he chooses to

most important. One wonders,

it

decree simply be-

Herodotus elected to build

clear that

is

when he

would imply that

of

his evidence

This technique demanded a

memory and cannot be separated from the more intanthat made Herodotus the unique man he was. There is

well-developed gible qualities

no

definition for the gifts of curiosity, patience,

He

rodotus brought to his enquiry.

and humanity that He-

never rejoiced over fallen enemies,

never celebrated power as power, never dictated history

was invariably

attentive to individual situations.

course.

its

Though

He

careful to

note similarities, he was even readier to detect differences; and there

not one scene in his

work

dent teaching in his

tale,

that looks like another.

it is

that of measure in

all

If

there

is

is

transcen-

things. Herodotus'

method is that of a man who does not want to suppress what is not in his power to understand or to correct and who allows mankind or its

—to

greater part

—

reflect itself

undisturbed in his mirror.

Ill

The importance

was very soon recognised. He made an impression on his contemporaries Sophocles and Aristophanes. He was given a handsome present by the Athenians for his

of Herodotus' achievement

pro-Athenian writings, as

source, Diyllus

(fr.

3

we

are told by an apparently reliable

Jacoby). His popularity with the Athenians

remarkable, seeing he was the

man who had

observed, with direct

was ref-

was easier to fool thirty thousand men than one. He was acknowledged to have been the father of history an appellation at least as old as Cicero. He was summarised by Theopompus erence to Athens, that

it

—

The Herodotean and

40

and commented upon by Aristarchus. Yet

the

Thucydidean Tradition

his reputation

that of the truthful historian. Even those w^ho admired as Dionysius of Halicarnassus

and Lucian, praised

Thucydides expressed

his reliability.

his

was never

him most, such

his style rather

contempt for the

than

levity of his

predecessor, and the opinion of the succeeding centuries

was on the whole on his side. Ctesias and Aristotle, Diodorus, Strabo, and Plutarch threw mud at Herodotus, and many were the books and pamphlets to denounce his lies. Even in the fourth century a.d., Libanius felt

obliged to write against Herodotus. His method quite clearly failed

to persuade. His readers could not believe that he

One can did not

draw

a clear line

cepted as true.

tility

He ac-

his

was due

in part to his

But any careful reader ought to have realised that he did all

The

is

the stories he told. Moreover, the sheer

should have

his enterprise

towards Herodotus

of a method.

reactions.

Plutarch, disliked Herodotus because he

The

was not

critic

we know

patriotic

best,

enough and

fate

if

Thucydides had

turn to historical studies that involved a repudiation

of his predecessor. credit

The hos-

to Boeotia.

Herodotus would not have suffered such a

new

respect.

were not capable of appreciating the depth of

critics

had preferred Athens

commanded

something more than a theoretical distrust

humanity and the subtlety of his

not given a

telling the truth.

shortcomings.

not take responsibility for

magnitude of

was

between what he reported and what he

argue that the failure

The

factors

which contributed

to Herodotus' dis-

were many, but one stands out: Thucydides put himself between

The exploration of the wider world was not Thucydides' vocation. He was an exile for at least twenty years. There were not many men he liked in Athens, and anyway he was not born to love his fellow beings. Yet every word he spoke was that of an Herodotus and

his readers.

Athenian. All his intellectual energies were directed towards understanding the meaning of the

no escape from ceived tory.

life in

the polis in

terms of political

Even the plague

avoid

—

is

war he had to face as an Athenian. He saw which he was born simply because he conlife

—the only

and history

agreement about what

its

Herodotus has is

terms of political his-

extrapolitical experience he could not

eventually examined for

dides' reaction against

in

political consequences. its

Thucy-

ultimate justification in a dis-

historical certainty, but

was primarily due

to

The Herodotean and the Thucydidean Tradition

41

man committed to the political life against a goodhumoured cosmopoHtan. Had not Herodotus treated as a joke the return of Pisistratus led by a woman masquerading as Athena?: "Seeing

the revulsion of a

from old times the Hellenic has ever been distinguished from the

that

Barbarian stock by fooHshness,

[it is

its

greater cleverness

strange] that these

men

and

its

freedom from

silly

should devise such a plan to

most cunning of the Greeks"

deceive the Athenians, said to be the

(I,

60).

Thucydides had the same questioning mind as

on

the Sophists, but he concentrated exclusively v^as to

him

the

the present; If

mere beginning of the

his

contemporaries

political

life.

The past

political situation that existed in

and the present was the basis

for understanding the past.

one understands the present, one understands the workings of hu-

man

nature. Present experiences can be put to future uses (though the

details of

such utilisation are

left

uncertain) or, alternatively, are the

key to the past. Thucydides assumes that the differences between ferent ages are

more

quantitative than qualitative.

mains fundamentally the same. But the present

which ical

it is

is

possible to have reliable information,

Human

nature

difre-

the only period about

and therefore

histor-

research must start with the present and can go into the past only

So strong

as far as the evidence allows.

is

Thucydides' conviction about

the centrality of the present in historical research that he does not feel it

necessary to examine at length the complementary proposition that

the present

is

the only time for

The unique position

reliable

is

something immutable

contemporary history

is

the only history

bly.

The

ical

narrows down the selection of

is

available.

on the double human nature and

in

which can be told

relia-

further premise that the events to be reckoned with are polit-

Men want

significant facts even in the present.

power, and can achieve

it

feuds and external wars are the result.

excluded: man's action is

information

of contemporary history depends

assumption that there that

which

is

only within the state. Internal

Mere biography

either political or nothing.

is

by definition

But man's action

not invariably blind. In times of revolution passions can reach the

point at which individuals are no longer able to answer for their actions. All that the historian

the

mechanism

can do

of their passions

in these

circumstances

is

—which Thucydides does

to define in the fa-

The Herodotean and the Thucydidean Tradition

42

mous

chapters of

Book

can explain themselves.

Normally, however, the political leaders

III.

No

ordinary struggle for powder can be under-

stood without taking into account what leaders special responsibility of the political leader to

say.

show

Indeed

it is

the

his grasp of the sit-

uation in speeches which persuade the crowd without making concessions to

its

The

blind passions.

historian will therefore take as

remember what leaders say knows that it is more difficult

what they

much

do. But he

care to

as to record

also

to give a trustworthy rendering of

a speech than a precise picture of a military expedition. It is

a notoriously

open question whether Thucydides meant to con-

vey the real utterances of the orators or whether his speeches represented their hidden thoughts rather than their actual orations. Put in this

crude way, the problem

insoluble.

is

Any

reader of Thucydides has

to admit that certain speeches look improbable.

The debate between

Cleon and Diodotus about the treatment of the Mytileneans

in

Book

III is

an example. The dialogue between Athenians and Melians

Book

V

is

The

another.

ious speeches

is

relative uniformity of the structure of the var-

a further difficulty for those

record of what was said.

ful

son to doubt that at could speak in the truth

must

lie

in

the other

He

how

do

it

was

to

who

hand

men with

take them as a faith-

there

is

no a

priori rea-

a sophisticated education

which Thucydides makes them speak. The

somewhere beyond

Thucydides' speeches. difficult

On

Athens

least in

way

in

the

two opposite

interpretations of

intended to report real speeches and so.

But judging politicians

as he did

knew

by their

grasp of the situation, he had to indicate what they must have thought,

even in cases where they were

likely to

have spoken

differently.

Like Herodotus, Thucydides did not question the presupposition

was more important than the written one. Like Herodotus he first trusted his own eyes and ears and next the eyes and ears of reliable witnesses. A casual remark in Book VII (44) shows how well he realised the limited value of eyewitnesses in battles. In two ways, however, he differed from Herodotus. First of all, he was never that oral tradition

satisfied

for

with straightforward reporting without taking responsibility

what he

reported.

(and the second point

Mere is

Xeyo)

xa XEy6\i£va was not for him. Second

to a certain extent a consequence of the

he very seldom indicated the sources of his information

first),

in detail.

He

The Herodotean and the Thucydidean Tradition felt

he should be taken on

and chronological

ical

to his readers

that

it

trust.

limits

and ask them

43

Having imposed such severe geograph-

on

he thought he could go

his enterprise,

to believe him.

never occurred to him

It

could be otherw^ise.

Very at least

little

of his history

some

is

built

on written evidence. Furthermore,

documents he quotes are not used to prove any-

of the

thing in particular but are simply part of the story. This explains, as

my

I

Wilamowitz and E. Schwartz thought that if Thucydides had completed his work he would have replaced the original text of these documents by a paraphrase in have already mentioned in

own

his

style.

The suggestion

first

is

chapter, w^hy

interesting but hardly convincing. In

other cases Thucydides quotes, or alludes to, texts with the clear pur-

pose of proving a point. Such texts are

and are to be found sanias

on the tripod of Delphi sanias

was buried

the story

place of cles

was

(I,

is

Persia (I,

132,

2),

mentioned

fact in contrast to the

letters

and the

in

(I,

exchanged between Paudraft of the inscription

first

stele indicating

where Pau-

order to authenticate and explain

The monument

a governor of the city

concerned with past history

128), the

(I,

mentioned

are

134, 4).

Magnesia

The

in excursuses.

and the King of

all

to Themistocles in the market-

138,

confirm that Themisto-

5) to

on behalf of the Persians

—

it is

also a

rumour, for which Thucydides cannot vouch,

that Themistocles' bones

had been transported

to Athens

and

secretly

buried in Attica.

The use of documents and monuments in the excursuses pared with that of the "proofs," or the so-called Archaeology.

indeed with a

survival, or even

tombs of Delos

past.

He

introduction

realises that

on evidence. The evidence he uses

from Homer,

kinds: a passage

com-

to be

Here again Thucydides deals with the

much more remote

conjectures based

xexjirigLa, in the

is

a present-day

he must is

past,

make

of different

custom interpreted

as a

an archaeological datum, such as that provided by the

(I,

must have used a

8, i). In

one case

local chronicle

it is

fairly certain that

from Samos.

A method

Thucydides

which com-

bines archaeological data, comparative ethnography, and historical

good that we wonder why The explanation is obvious.

interpretation of literary texts seems to us so

Thucydides used

it

only in his preface.

Thucydides does not describe the past as he describes the present.

The Herodotean and the Thucydidean Tradition

44

What seems

to us the surest

method

of historical research

cydides a second best to replace direct observation detailed

knowledge

The past

impossible.

is

teresting or significant in

itself. It is

development from past to present

294). To put

le

meme more

it

is

was

is

not

a linear one. I'histoire

in-

The

As Mme. de Romilly

une progression allant

pointedly, just because the past leads by simple

back from the present. This the past

for Thucydides

sens" [Histoire et raison chez Thucydide, 1956,

progression to the present, the only

whom

and

certain

only the prelude to the present.

has observed, Thucydides "prete a toujours dans

when

Thu-

for

is

way

knowing about

of

it is

to

go

another difference with Herodotus, for

is

significant in itself.

IV to say

It is difficult

how much Thucydides

impressed his immediate

successors in the fourth century B.C. Philistus of Syracuse, scribed as his closest follower,

pus,

who

critic of

lenica

is

is little

more than

said to have continued his work,

Thucydides' speeches.

If

Cratippus

is

is

a

name

also

who

is

de-

to us. Cratip-

mentioned

as a

the author of the Hel-

Oxyrhynchia something more can be said about him: he was

objective

and

careful

and followed Thucydides

in

chronology and in

distinguishing between superficial and profound causes of events. Xen-

ophon and Theopompus

started

view were very

their points of

where Thucydides had stopped, but

different.

Xenophon thought

that the

Spartans had lost the hegemony over Greece because the gods pun-

them after their treacherous capture of the citadel of Thebes. One wonders what Thucydides would have thought of that. Theopompus ished

developed a highly emotional approach to Athenian

way

politics and, gen-

was repugnant to Thucydides. Ephorus went back to earlier times and covered that period between the Trojan and the Peloponnesian wars which Thucydides had not conerally speaking,

took sides

in a

that

sidered the proper field for detailed research. Thucydides did not impress his successors

history reveals

when he claimed

that the study of contemporary

permanent features of human nature. The historians of

the fourth century preferred the simpler view (which they transmitted to the succeeding centuries) that history

is

a lesson in behaviour.

Nor

The Herodotean and the Thucydidean Tradition

45

did they share his virtual atheism or his impassioned evaluation of hu-

man

events in terms of conflicts of power.

What

portant, these fourth-century historians tried to

is

perhaps more im-

do something w^hich

Thucydides had not done. Xenophon experimented with

intellectual

biography, with philosophic historiography, and with straight auto-

biography (the account of his military experiences

Theopompus

(I

would

still

maintain even after Professor Connor's

book) placed one man, Philip of Macedon, picture of contemporary to write

life

in the Anabasis).

at the centre of the great

in his Philippic Histories.

Ephorus

tried

Greek history from the origins within the framework of a uni-

versal history; Polybius considered

Ephorus to be

his predecessor as a

universal historian.

Yet very few doubted either in the fourth century or later that Thucydides

was trustworthy. Only

Flavins Josephus mentions in passing

that there were critics of Thucydides' reliability.

On

whole Thu-

the

cydides remained the model of the truthful historian. Thucydides

saved history from becoming the prey of the increasingly influential rhetoricians

who

cared more for words than for truth.

When

Praxi-

phanes, the pupil of Theophrastus, wrote a dialogue to explain what history

is

about, he chose Thucydides as the model historian. Even

Thucydides' principle that contemporary history past history

was not

seriously questioned.

is

more

reliable

Ephorus himself,

who

than

broke

away from contemporary history, admitted in the preface to his work that it was impossible to be as reliably informed about the past as about recent events. The most important achievement of Thucydides was to persuade his successors that history is political history. None of the great historians of the fourth century really departed from this notion. Geography in the Herodotean sense and extrapolitical events do appear in historical works of the fourth century, but in the form of introductions to real history or in excursuses. Ephorus had a geographical introduction; Theopompus indulged in a long excursus on prodigies and had another, of slanderous biographical character, on demagogues. The main line of both Ephorus and Theopompus was pohtical. In later centuries

a writer.

It is

Thucydides was often discussed and

enough to read the

life

criticised as

of Thucydides written by

Mar-

The Herodotean and the Thucydidean Tradition

46

cellinus or the rhetorical treatises of Dionysius of

Hahcarnassus to

dis-

cover the main criticisms that were levelled against him. Dionysius,

who

resented Thucydides' obscurities, went so far as to rewrite whole

passages to

show how Thucydides should have expressed

controversy about Thucydides' style penetrated to of Atticism and became part of Sallust

and

literary life

who

Cicero. There were always people

tus to Thucydides

number

Roman

in the

of historians

matter of

style,

Rome

The wake

himself. in the

from the time of

preferred Herodo-

and there was equally a good

who

from Arrian to Procopius

eclectically imi-

tated Herodotean and Thucydidean features of language. But what

happened

to

Herodotus never happened to Thucydides: that those

who admired his

style declared

most proclaim him of Herodotus, Ephorus and

him

a

liar.

Nor

unreliable. Unlike Ctesias

did those

who used him

and Manetho

Aristotle did not insult

in the case

Thucydides

after

having used him. The influence of Herodotus as a historian, as a master of historical

method,

is

something to be discovered with

We may

and almost

entirely indirectly.

maeus took

of his history of the West;

it

suspect

it

in the

we may more

difficulty

wide view Ti-

certainly perceive

in the structure of Posidonius' histories, a continuation of Polybius.

Where ethnography combined with

history in the description of for-

eign nations, as in Megasthenes' description of India and in Hecataeus of Abdera's account of Egypt, the Greek historians maintained contact

with the teaching of Herodotus; and so did the foreigners to write the history of their

own

But even these historians had

who came

nations according to Greek methods.

difficulty in

history with descriptions of lands

combining

and customs

military-political

in the

manner

of

He-

rodotus. To give the most obvious example, Arrian separated his ac-

count of India from his history of Alexander the Great. The historians of Greece, the writers of

about Alexander and ical

and military

monographs about individual Greek

—"Thucydidean" history history

his successors,

history. Political

remained constant to pure

states,

polit-

continued to be the history par excellence for the majority of the ancients.

Ethnography, biography, religion, economics,

upon

at all,

lenistic

when touched

remained marginal. The most serious historians of the Hel-

period and

wars and

art,

alliances.

many who were not

serious confined themselves to

Ptolemy and Aristobulos among the historians of

The Herodotean and the Thucydidean Tradition

Alexander, Hieronymus of Cardia

among

47

the memorialists of the next

was given new auThe Roman senators who educated themselves on

generation, were political historians. This trend thority by Polybius.

Thucydides and Polybius were of course inclined,

if

anything, to ac-

centuate the unilaterality of the political and military approach.

and

case of Polybius deserves particular attention both in itself influence

Roman

had on Greek and

it

Ephorus more than Thucydides. This historian.

As

far as

is

know, Thucydides

I

surviving parts of Polybius (VIII, ii,

from that of Thucydides.

may

for the

He admired

historiography.

natural enough in a universal is

mentioned only once

and not

3),

in the

in a very significant

context. Polybius' strictly didactic attitude towards history ferent

The

In his statements

is

very dif-

about speeches one

detect an implicit criticism of the obviously invented speeches of

Thucydides: he wants historians to report speeches as they were actually

made. Yet Polybius accepts

method. tion

He

all

the fundamentals of Thucydides'

accepts Thucydides' notion of historical truth, his distinc-

between profound and

ferent terminology), and,

porary history.

He may

superficial causes (though he

above

all,

his

may

use a

notion of political and contem-

not have admired Thucydides, but he certainly

learned a lot from him.

He

kept history writing in the direction indi-

cated by Thucydides. By demolishing Timaeus in the ruthless did, Polybius eliminated

whom

one of the

decisive effect in persuading the

clined

way he

first-rank Hellenistic historians in

one could see a clear trace of Herodotean methods.

cal history.

dif-

Romans

that history

is

He had

mainly

a

politi-

This persuasion was not entirely superfluous. However in-

we may

be to take the

Romans

as political animals, the first

Ro-

man historian,

Fabius Pictor, was not averse to the nonpolitical aspects

of history. His

model was Timaeus. He may never have read Thucy-

dides.

Nor

did Cato

commit himself

the next generations of

Roman

to a purely political history.

we

over to a strict ideal of political history: as in Livy

that the

and

first

law of history

than the truth, falsi

Tacitus. Cicero

"Nam

is

who

historians

won much

read Polybius were

find

it

in Sallust as

remembered Thucydides when he to say nothing

quis nescit

primam

dicere audeat, deinde ne quid veri

But

more and nothing

said less

esse historiae legem, ne quid

non audeat" (De

orat. II, 15,

62). It is

interesting that outside Republican

Rome

Polybius never shared

The Herodotean and the Thucydidean Tradition

48

the prestige of Thucydides.

Rome

about

The Greeks

— even the Greeks who wrote Dio Cassius — recognised that

in the Imperial age, such as

Thucydides, not Polybius, was the model of political history. Style

more than

No

contents, one suspects, determined their preference.

writer of the second century B.C. had any chance of competing with the

was not only a question of style. As long as readers were told that Herodotus was a liar and Thucydides was the truth, Thucydides was bound to remain the ideal representative of history. Lucian stated this in words which Ranke must have known well. It was Thucydides, according to Lucian, "classics" in the schools of the Imperial age. Yet

who

gave history

its

law

—the law of saying

it

d)g EJigaxOr],

what had

been done (25, 41). Lucian added that Thucydides enacted this law against Herodotus. We may well feel disappointed in the quality of the

work done by

the pupils of Thucydides in Antiquity.

None had

his

penetrating intelligence, very few had his aristocratic sincerity and so-

berness of judgement.

We

shall

not discuss here

why men

of genius are

not more frequent. Certain other reasons for the decline

Thucydides are apparent. The climate of

after

in quality

intellectual liberty of

was unique. From the fourth century B.C. rhetoric historians, and philosophy dissuaded them from history.

fifth-century Athens

attracted the

Finally, a historiography that

inadequate instruments

and unable

sures

tions, as

we

is

compelled to deal with the past with

is

bound

to be very sensitive to political pres-

to rethink the past in depth.

shall see,

remained operative

Some

of these limita-

until the nineteenth century.

would be hard to underrate the amount of sober and permanent work done by historians in the wake of Thucydides. A few of their new But

it

Hnes

I

have already indicated.

Finley's

judgement: "Of

tiated, history

ans^

New

was

the

all

most

I

cannot subscribe to

the lines of inquiry

my

friend

M. I.

which the Greeks

ini-

abortive" (Introd. to The Greek Histori-

York, 1959, 20).

V If

we

pass from Antiquity to the Renaissance, our to

impression

is

more than Thucydides. He is indeed the first have made a big impact on the Westerners who had

that Polybius counted for

Greek historian

first

The Herodotean and the Thucydidean Tradition

49

rediscovered the Greek historians. His subject matter teresting

War.

more

in-

paraphrased by Leonardo Bruni, studied by PoHtian,

commented upon by MachiavelH. is

far

and famihar to the humanists than the obscure Peloponnesian

He was

Tacitus,

was

is

Polybius, together with Livy

and

behind the revival of the Greek ideal of political history that

such a conspicuous part of the more general renaissance of classical

values and forms in the sixteenth century. Until the end of the seventeenth century Polybius remained the master of political, diplomatic,

and military wisdom. Casaubon was Justus Lipsius, the

his translator

commentator and champion of

great student of Polybius as a military historian,

good guide

in fighting the Turks. Isaac Vossius

and

his apologist.

Tacitus,

whom

was

also a

he treated as a

put him at the centre of

Greek historiography. In comparison with him Thucydides attracted

The authoritative criticisms by Dionysius of Halicarnassus were heeded. The translator and commentator of Dionysius on Thucydides, Andreas Dudith, was also the most acrimonious enemy of Thucydides in the sixteenth century: postremo "Non iam in historia summus Thucydides videbitur sed

positive attention as a historian in select circles.

.

in

ordine contemptus iacebit."

It

did not help

much

.

.

that Lucian

whose pamphlet on history was compulsory reading in the Renaissance was a great admirer of Thucydides. The few who were interested in Thucydides were not professional historians. Hobbes was not, nor was the Jesuit Pere Rapin (1681). They represented the tastes of men who wanted a more candid and subtle view of human nature than that offered by Polybius and Tacitus. Pere Rapin knew his Pascal and

—

Corneille. But the very fact that his defence of

Thucydides took the

form of a comparison between Thucydides and Livy

was

left in

doubt

— shows that Rapin was not

— and the

result

interested in historical

research.

was not until the second part of the eighteenth century, as far as I know, that the general climate of opinion began to change to the definite advantage of Thucydides. The Abbe de Mably commended Thucydides as the historian whom princes and their ministers should read once a year {De la maniere d'ecrire I'histoire, 1784, 12,5). Then the Romantic movement elevated Thucydides to the position which he still occupies and made him the model philosophic historian, who comIt

The Herodotean and the Thucydidean Tradition

50

bines accurate examination of details with a deep imaginative under-

human mind. Thucydides, though expedants were now growing as fast as the

standing of the working of the act,

was not

a pedant,

and the

Monumenta Germaniae. There

is

an element of nostalgia

nineteenth-century cult for Thucydides which

view that obtained its

most

we have

in Creuzer, Schelling, F. Schlegel,

attractive formulation

in

in

the

inherited.

The

and Ranke found

the Life of Thucydides by

W.

Roscher, a pupil of Ranke and one of the founders of modern eco-

nomic

studies. All these people

to defend Polybius

had

to point out that he

versal historian than Thucydides

Even

so,

to Polybius as the

philosophic to the utilitarian. Those

artistic to the inartistic, the

wanted

opposed Thucydides

few were convinced by

was more

and therefore nearer to

this observation,

who

of a uni-

Christianity.

which was made for

instance by H. Ulrici in his excellent Charakteristik der antiken His-

toriographie (1833).

To

us,

however, the conflict between Thucydides and Polybius in the

early nineteenth century

change

is

in the fortunes of

Thucydides

less interesting

Thucydides.

than another aspect of the

was Herodotus who rescued

It

at the eleventh hour. Thucydides' admirers

also, primarily,

qualities they

were by

now

Herodotus' admirers. They admired Thucydides for

had

first

encountered in Herodotus. The conflict between

Thucydides and Polybius had come to replace the

conflict

between He-

rodotus and Thucydides. Critics began to discover harmony between

Herodotus and Thucydides plemented each other.

What happened,

— or

in

about 1460,

acknowledged that they com-

What had happened?

broadly speaking, was that since the middle of the

sixteenth century Herodotus

respected author.

at least

When

had become

a very respectable

and a very

he had started to circulate again in the West

in Valla's translation, the

humanists of course remem-

bered the old attacks against him. For a while they were divided in their loyalties.

a

liar,

Should one believe the ancients

who

called

Herodotus

or should one abandon oneself to the charm and the doctrine of

the newly revealed author? Pontano

Vives had liars of

made Herodotus an

had

tried to strike a balance,

J.

L.

occasion for attacks against the Greek

every age. But there were two

new

factors:

discovered; and the Reformation had created a

new

America had been interest in biblical

The Herodotean and the Thucydidean Tradition history. In

America the Europeans could

51

see

many

things

more

incred-

than those they read in Herodotus, and incidentally Herodotus

ible

was a great help in trying to describe them. Furthermore, no one but Herodotus could help to fill the background of Oriental history necessary for an understanding of biblical history. Henricus Stephanus in his

Apologia pro Herodoto of about 1566 was the

pact of the

new

otus. Scaliger,

to grasp the im-

geographical discoveries on the evaluation of Herod-

on the other hand, admired and used Herodotus

supplement to the Bible. Later

was used

first

in the seventeenth

to defend Bible stories

When men

which the

as a

century Herodotus

sceptics

were beginning to

Newton declared their faith in Herodotus, respectability was assured. Newton declared that he drew up chronological tables to "make chronology suit with the course of nature, with doubt.

like

astronomy, with sacred history and with Herodotus, the father of tory." This, historiographically,

had profound consequences.

It

his-

meant

modern ethnography was born as a conscious continuation of the work done by Herodotus and the other geographers and ethnographers of Antiquity. As Herodotus, among the surviving authors of Antiquity, had travelled most even more than Polybius and had derived least from preexisting books, he became an inspiration to the true traveller as opposed to the armchair historian. But Herodotus was more than that. He was the candid, poetic historian who believed in some sort of

that

—

—

divine intervention in

human

affairs,

talked pleasantly about freedom,

respected and loved popular traditions.

On

the eve of Romanticism,

Herder was not slow to perceive that Herodotus was

his ally.

Herod-

otus had "the effortless, mild sense of humanity," "der unangestrengte,

milde Sinn der Menschheit," and Herder's words were echoed by

many

other critics in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

When Voltaire tried to superimpose an "histoire des moeurs" on the ordinary history of battles, who could provide a better example than Herodotus? Admittedly Herodotus was naive, but here Thucydides could act as a corrective, ress of ideas

pects of

made

both it

in realism

and

in accuracy.

A sense of the prog-

easy to justify the less immediately convincing as-

Herodotus and therefore to eliminate any reason for preserv-

ing the old opposition between Herodotus and Thucydides. If

Herodotus was the naive,

fresh contemplation of the past,

Thu-

The Herodotean and the Thucydidean Tradition

52.

was

cydides

analysis of

more thoughtful, experienced impression is that Herodotus was more

the representative of a

human

destiny.

My

easily appreciated in isolation during the eighteenth century

than in the

nineteenth century. In the eighteenth century he was the wise cosmopolitan. In the nineteenth century political history, especially in Ger-

—

many

which we can leave aside here

for reasons

—became predomi-

nant again. Therefore Thucydides attracted greater attention and was considered more congenial than Herodotus. Yet Herodotus was never dismissed again as a

liar

or as an incompetent historian. Scholars in

three centuries of Oriental and Greek studies

At worst Herodotus was subordinated put on the same footing with

now

were the

to

know better.

to Thucydides; at best he

The

his old rival.

had

attributed to Thucydides and

had come

first

qualities

been found

qualities of philosophic understanding

and

which were

in

Herodotus

artistic insight.

The new position of Herodotus indicated that trustworthy need no longer be contemporary history. It indicated also that tory of civilisation into

its

—

as

opposed

to

own. The varying fortunes

nineteenth centuries are a

mere

of

symptom

political history

Herodotus

was

history

the his-

—

come

^had

in the eighteenth

and

of the tension existing between the

supporters of political history and the supporters of the history of civilisation.

But even

in the time

and

in the

country of Treitschke, history

was not forgotten. The situation was affected by many other factors. One, of a purely historiographical nature, we shall have to examine in the next chapof civilisation

—namely, the intervention

ter

and excavations, study

of the antiquarians. Research in archives

of inscriptions

and

coins,

made

it

clear that

was no substantial difference in reliability between the study of recent and the study of remote events. Thus the scope for research in extendextrapolitical events was enlarged. The world of Herodotus ing over the centuries and over the various aspects of human activities and the world of Thucydides concentrated in in different countries one period, one country, one activity could no longer look like two

there

—

—

worlds apart. There

more

is

no need

—

to

add that today Herodotus

generally appreciated, certainly

cydides.

The need

—

more

is

perhaps

generally loved, than

for a comprehensive, extrapolitical history

mitted by almost everyone. Herodotus seems to us so

Thu-

is

ad-

much more hu-

The Herodotean and the Thucydidean Tradition

man one

53

than Thucydides. Perhaps he also offers an escape

— from the iron tower

having shut himself in granted.

What

rivals of

Antiquity

knowledged

is

it.

in

— a deUghtful

which Thucydides wants to shut

us, after

These are considerations we may take for

characteristic of the present situation

is

that the

two

—Herodotus and Thucydides —have become the

joint founders of historical research.

ac-

Herodotus would

not have minded, but Thucydides must be horrified at the association.

CHAPTER THREE

The Rise

Antiquarian Research

of

I

Throughout to

my

my

Ufe

I

have been fascinated by a type of

man

so near

profession, so transparently sincere in his vocation, so under-

standable in his enthusiasms, and yet so deeply mysterious in his

mate aims: the type

of

man who

being interested in history.

is

ulti-

interested in historical facts w^ithout

Nowadays

the pure antiquarian

is

rarely

met with. To find him one must go into the provinces of Italy or France and be prepared to listen to lengthy explanations by old men in uncomfortably cold, dark rooms. As soon as the antiquarian leaves his shabby palace which preserves something of the eighteenth century and enters modern life, he becomes the great collector, he is bound to specialise, and he may well end up as the founder of an institute of fine arts or of comparative anthropology. The time-honoured antiquarian has fallen victim to an age of specialisation. He is now worse than outdated: he has himself become a historical problem to be studied against the background of crosscurrents of thought and of changing "Weltanschauungen" the very things he wanted to avoid.

—

Let us consider for a

moment

Nicolas-Claude Fabri sieur de

that archetype of

Peiresc.

He was born in

all

antiquarians:

1580, and where

could he have been born but in Provence, not far from Aix?

He was

a

descendant of magistrates and members of parliament, to become himself a

magistrate and

member

shrewd administrator of

54

his duties

his family estate.

He remained

a bachelor;

more so than his shaky health should have allowed. Aix was his love and pride, and

and he was an inveterate and

of parliament and, incidentally, a very

traveller, far

The Rise of Antiquarian Research there he died in

1637 among

55

minerals, scientific instruments, and

what

was lamented memorial book, a

not. His death

in forty different languages, including Scottish, in a

"generis glossia

humani

lessus," a

books, plants,

his collections of medals,

"complaint of the

human

compiled by the Academy of Humoristi

race" called Fan-

Rome

in

under the pa-

tronage of Cardinal Francesco Barberini, a nephew of Pope Urban VIII. a

Claude de Peiresc published almost nothing: there

pamphlet on a second-rate antiquarian

and witty

letters to

many

of the great

Rubens: there are thousands of them his Aix, in the libraries,

men

only

But he wrote learned

of his time,

from Grotius to

in the Bibliotheque

Mejanes of

Bibliotheque Inguimbertine of Carpentras and in other

which have been only

edition by

subject.

in print

is

partially published in the

Tamizey de Larroque and elsewhere; and

monumental

in the last period

of his Hfe at least he kept a very careful register of all his correspon-

dence. sendi,

ology

He shared in the astronomic observations of his friend Gaswho was to become his biographer. He experimented in physiand performed dissections both on animals and on human

Angora cats were his speciality, and he used to give them men whom he wanted to induce to sell antiquities. He wrote to one bodies.

his agents: "If

it

were useful to promise one of the kittens

get the vase of Vivot,

do not

hesitate to

commit

mately his overriding preference was for antiques

in

to

of

order to

yourself." For ulti-

—

coins, statues,

and

manuscripts. There were seventeen thousand pieces in his cabinet de medailles

when he

died.

He

studied

what he

— and a great

collected^

more besides. His name is best known in connection with the Grand Camee de Paris and with the Calendar of Philocalus: the latter, but not the former, was in his possession. Jews and heretics were among his correspondents: the two Nostradamus, Rabbi Salomon Azubius, and Tommaso Campanella. The Samaritan Bible and the Provencal troubadours were among the subjects in which he was

deal

interested.

Can we find a sense in all these chaotic activities? They certainly made sense to Peiresc's contemporaries, to begin with his biographer, P. Gassendi (1641). The name of Gassendi immediately introduces us to the circle of libertins erudits Dupuy, Naude, Gui Patin, La Mothe

—

Le Vayer. Sextus Empiricus (translated by Henricus Stephanus into

The Rise of Antiquarian Research

56

Latin in 1562 and available in Greek since 1621) was one of their men-

who had a Jewish mother, who wrote Quod nihil offer to men living in the bor-

Sextus also appealed to Montaigne,

tors.

and to Francisco Sanches, the son of Marranos, scitur.

He

obviously had something to

derland between different religions, but he also opened up to those

who were

confession.

It is

new

vistas

own

tired of theological controversies within their

true that Peiresc does not appear to have taken part in

the debauches pyrrhoniennes of

Patin wrote in a

famous

Naude, Gassendi, and

letter [Lettres III,

fronted by the Dialogues d'Oratius Tubero

—

Patin, of

508 of 1648).

which

When

con-

—the Sceptic publication of

Mothe Le Vayer Peiresc disclaimed any understanding of such deep thoughts: "moy qui ne cognoys rien en routes ces grandes elevations d'esprit" (IV, 385). But three days later he made to his friend Francois de La

Gassendi one of his most forceful statements against those centuries

"de grande simplicite" in which one believed everything "sans aultre preuve que de simples conjectures de ce qui pouvoit avoir este" 383). Peiresc

was

a Pyrrhonist in so far as Pyrrhonists liked tangible

and Gassendi agreed that empirical observation

things,

and

was

more trustworthy than dogmatic philosophy. As

in

far

Peiresc

marque

les erreurs

des calculs

more solemn Latin confirms looking what hits the eye.

in

It is

there

is

les

plus savants." His biographer

that Peiresc regretted the habit of over-

They never admitted

no cogent reason

to

osity

and

with

all his

distrust of

Galileo the

to being unbelievers,

facts, in a spirit of universal curi-

dogmatism. They admired Galileo, and Peiresc

caution wrote to Cardinal Barberini that in condemning

Church was running

the risk of appearing to posterity as

the persecutor of another Socrates: "pourrait

name

la

and

assume that they were. But they turned to

experiments, documents, individual

paree a

s'im-

an unrealistic question to ask whether Gassendi or Peiresc be-

lieved in Christianity.

a

wrote

Peiresc

one particular case to Pere Anastase: "I'observation directe

pose, et

(IV,

meme

etre

un jour com-

persecution que Socrate eprouva dans sa patrie." Galileo

to be retained in connection with the antiquarians.

The

is

Italian

antiquarians of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries were quite explicit in declaring themselves his pupils.

I

have no doubt either

that Gassendi and Peiresc and their friends were also trying to apply

The Rise of Antiquarian Research the Galilean

method

57

of observation to their

own

antiquarian studies.

They were convinced that they could examine material objects of the past in a positive scientific manner, and they disliked the bias of the historians

decessors.

who worked on

evidence provided by equally biased pre-

We can understand why Henricus Stephanus — neither a real

CathoUc nor a

—was an admirer both of Herodotus and

real Calvinist

Herodotus

of Sextus Empiricus: he liked

from

direct observation,

and

Sextus Empiricus as a thinker

as a true collector of facts

in his colourful

who would

language he described

help to drive to madness the

dogmatic impious philosophers of modern times, "ut nostri saeculi dogmaticos

impios

philosophos

Herodotean historians were Htical

and

jectivity,

ad

insaniam

traditionally too

redigam."

Post-

much committed

to po-

religious controversies to be in tune with the desire for ob-

experiment, and theological neutrality characteristic of the

erudits.

The new Pyrrhonism turned against the reliability of ordinary historians. The antiquarians were in a stronger position. Material objects spoke for the times in which they had been made. As the great Spaniard Antonio Agustm had written in a work published in 1587, and many others had repeated later, nothing could be more reliable than Roman coins official documents guaranteed by the Roman authorities themselves. Of course the libertins erudits were aware that objects

—

can be forged, but they also that

is

knew how to

detect forgeries. For one coin

forged, a hundred are authentic and serve as a check. But

could one check the account of a battle in Thucydides or Livy

if it

how was

unique?

II

Thus

Peiresc

and

his

company provide

us with at least something of

an introduction to the mentality of the antiquarians. Their passion for ancient objects

was

the consequence of their interest in empirical ob-

They distrusted literary tradition, disliked theological controversy, and had little use for ordinary political history. A fair dose of scepticism directly handed down from servation and experiment in

all fields.

Sextus Empiricus contributed to their attitude.

It is

noteworthy that

The Rise of Antiquarian Research

58

many

of the great antiquarians

of the seventeenth

century from

Charles Patin to Jacob Spon were physicians: a fact already com-

mented upon by contemporaries. Interpretation of individual objects or inscriptions was the favourite exercise of these men. They were capable of appraising unrelated facts which to us seem entirely remote

from any serious of the his

pursuit.

Angelo Fabroni,

who

wrote the

lives of

some

most important antiquarians of the seventeenth century and

own

of

time, emphasised with admiration the variety of subjects stud-

ied by his heroes.

He

never considered

it

necessary to find a unifying

interest in them. In describing, for instance, the activities of Filippo

Buonarroti he

jump

made no attempt

to understand

why Buonarroti had

to

from Silander and Aureliopolis "pene incognitae urbes" to the

"status civitatis" of Tarsus

and to the meaning of "Neocori." Indeed

Buonarroti himself would never have expected his biographer to worry

about

that.

The antiquarians loved

disparate and obscure facts. But be-

hind the individual, seemingly unrelated items there was Antiquity, mysterious and august. Implicitly every antiquarian

supposed to

add

knew

was meant that

that he

to the picture of Antiquity. In practice that

the individual facts were collected and set aside with a view to a future

general survey of those institutions, customs, cults, for which coins

and inscriptions were regarded as the most important evidence. The antiquarian's mind truly wandered to and fro between single facts and general surveys.

The

survey,

if it

ever

came

(not very often),

never be an ordinary book of history. Antiquity was

would

static: it called for

systematic descriptions of ancient institutions, religion, law, finances.

The

literary

form of the handbook

tablished since 1583,

Romanarum

when

antiquitatum

J.

of antiquities

had been firmly

es-

Rossfeld, called Rosinus, published his

lihri decern.

served the structure of Rosinus'

Later antiquarian works pre-

book with remarkable

uniformity.

The antiquarians of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries would not have been what they were if they had considered themselves a new sect. Rather, they prided themselves on being a relic of Antiquity. The very name they used, antiquarius, recalled the Antiquitates (humanae et divinae)

by Varro. They delighted

Philostratus,

and Pausanias

in Pliny,

Athenaeus, Aulus Gellius,

as their predecessors.

We must accept their

claim to be the continuators of the ancient antiquarians.

The Rise of Antiquarian Research

What may seem

59

coincidence

is

perhaps not entirely casual.

First, in

Antiquity, too, erudite research had flourished during periods of intel-

The

lectual doubt.

rise of the Sophists, the birth of the great philo-

sophic schools after Alexander, the introduction of academic scepti-

cism in

Rome

second and

in the

first

centuries B.C., are simultaneous

with the best periods of ancient erudition. Second, there

ogy between the systematic handbooks of the

late

systematic organisation of ancient erudition. of

mind

of the ancient antiquarians

history

from antiquarian studies

happened

in fact

of the Sophists.

the

a fair

attitude

to have been passed

the separation of political

also to be

is

when Thucydides

It is

finally,

Renaissance and the

The systematic

would appear

on to the modern ones. Third and

a clear anal-

is

found

in Antiquity. It

created political history in the age

assumption that

if

Herodotus had remained

model historian there would never have been any antiquarians. His

curiosity potentially

embraced

all

the subjects

of the antiquarian province. Thucydides

should not prevail. In consequence history

and military

litical

which

saw to became

became part that Herodotus

later

it

a narration of po-

events, preference being given to the events of

which the writer had been a witness.

All the "classic" historians after

Herodotus —^Thucydides, Xenophon, Ephorus, Polybius, Tacitus — conformed to pattern.

Sallust, Livy,

this

Erudition, as

is

maeus, was not an historian.

made

clear by Polybius in his polemics against Ti-

essential,

Authors of

indeed not even a desirable, quality in a

chronography, genealogy, erudite

local history,

dissertations, ethnographical works,

rank as true historians.

It is

enough

to

whatever

their merits, did

remind ourselves that the

the important historians in Quintilian includes,

among

not

list

of

the Greeks,

Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Theopompus, Ephorus, Philistus, Clitarchus,

and Timagenes. Not one antiquarian

deed any of the historians of Attica.

If

is

included

was

a world in

itself,

and the

conflicts

were more than

local historians.

It is

it is

because

between Greeks and Car-

thaginians were of general political importance. ily

in-

the historians of Sicily are con-

sidered real historians (as the mention of Philistus shows), Sicily

—nor

The

historians of Sic-

no accident that Antiochus of

Syracuse was a source of Thucydides, whereas Philistus, next in time

and

in

importance, was an admirer and imitator of Thucydides.

No

6o writer on religious

tory has

rites,

come down

Ephorus or

barbarian laws, obsolete names, or local his-

to us with a reputation

comparable to that of

Everyone sensed that writers of

Sallust.

kind were

this

something other than historians. Yet there would have been no clear

answer to the question

as to

A comprehensive word to

what they actually were. indicate what we call antiquarian

did not exist in Antiquity, though in Hellenistic and

Roman

studies

times the

notion was expressed, with a certain vagueness, by terms such as xqlTixog, (j)L)i6A.oY05, Jio^iuioxoag, YQOt!^^oitL>^65, doctus, eruditus, litera-

The nearest approximation was the word aqxavokoyoz,^ as it appeared in Plato. The Sophist Hippias is made to say in the Platonic tus.

Hippias major 285

D

that genealogies of heroes and

men, traditions

eponymous magistrates are part of a science called archaeology. The fact that Plato puts the word "archaeology" into the mouth of Hippias does not strictly prove that Hippias used it. But Hippias was an authority on the subjects mentioned by Plato. He compiled the list of the winners of the Olympic games, and did research on names and laws. Furthermore, archaeology is one of those abstract words which the Sophists were apt to invent. about the foundation of

What

cities,

Plato proves in any case

and

is

of

lists

that either in the

fifth

or in the fourth

century certain types of historical studies were called archaeology, not history. This convenient terminology

fourth century B.C. Archaeology

times to indicate a

work on

was not

was used

generally used after the

Roman

Archaeology

history of Rome. Flavins Josephus' Jewish Archaeology the Jews from their origins to Josephus'

who

History or

on the

wrote

in the age of

Samos was was

times.

is

an archaic

a history of

A work

by King

Roman

by or attributed to Semonides

name of ArchaePhanodemus, a work of the

retrospectively given the

ology of Samos, and even the Atthis of fourth century B.C.,

own

is

Augustus, could be called either

Roman Archaeology. A poem

origins of

Roman

archaic history or a history from the

origins. Dionysius of Halicarnassus'

Juba,

and

in Hellenistic

later called

Archaeology because

it

dealt

mainly with the archaic history of Athens. Thus in the Hellenistic age

word "archaeology" lost the meaning we find in Plato. If Hippias tried to establish aQxmokoy'm as opposed to laxogia he failed. The other terms we mentioned, from 4)l}i6>iOyo5 to eruditus, were never so the

The Rise of Antiquarian Research precise.

The

able to

make

failure

is

61

significant.

It

means

that the ancients were not

a clear-cut distinction between proper history

ferent type of research

which

is

and

a dif-

concerned with the past without being

history.

But the tinction

failure to create a clear

and permanent terminological

dis-

between history and the other type of research does not imply

that the distinction

was forgotten or

felt

only vaguely. Local history,

genealogy, chronology, mythography, study of ancient laws, ceremonies,

names,

etc.,

developed outside the main stream of historiography.

Negatively these studies were characterised by a lack of prominent political interests,

by indifference to contemporary issues of general im-

portance, and by a lack of rhetorical accomplishments. Positively they

were characterised by an

interest in the

minute

details of the past,

undisguised local patriotism, by curiosity for unusual events and

and by display

strosities,

One

feature, not of

of learning as

all,

lined particularly because

we

but of it

antiquarian studies.

call

many

was bound It is

an end

by

mon-

in itself.

of these

works must be under-

to determine the future of

their systematic treatment.

what

Ordinary

The whole sense of the historical narration depends on the time factor, on the correct succession of events. Much of the research we are now examining was not true to this chronological principle of organisation. It was systematic and covered the whole subject section by section: it was descriptive in a systematic form, not explanatory in a chronological order. This was not unnatural. If you study the names of nations, eOvwv ovo^iaaiaL, or the history

sacrifices

easiest

chronologically ordered.

is

customary

approach

is

political events are

words are

was easy

was

to

to

had

way

unknown

the dates of origin of institutions

or difficult to discover.

— or was the purpose

of course

of writing

Aax£6aL|iovi Oijolwv, the

examine them one by one. The dates of many

known, but

to establish

tiquarians clearest

either

in Sparta, ji8Qi toov 8v

When

and

chronology

of their research

—the an-

no objection to chronological order. The

on an antiquarian subject such

do so chronologically. Indeed

in

some

as local history

local histories the

names

eponymous magistrates of the year were placed before the report on the events of that year. The local chronicle of Athens was organised of the

according to the sequence of the Athenian archons (Jacoby,

Fr.

Gr.

6z

The Rise of Antiquarian Research

Hist. Ill, b,

II, p.

14, n. 132); the chronicle of

Samian magistrates (Herod.

The systematic order

Samos according

59, 4; Thucyd.

Ill,

ultimately

came

to the

13, 2).

I,

to represent a major,

if

not

the only, criterion of distinction between proper history and other re-

search about the past. Having been adopted by Varro in his Antiquitates,

it

also

became

Roman

a feature of

studies

on the past and was

transmitted to the humanists of the fifteenth century. The time factor thus played a lesser part in antiquarian studies than in those of political

works on

history. In their turn the

avoided any systematic presentation: at

(when

Aristotle's Politics

it

political history generally

all

became known)

events as a

no one thought of

book

of history.

Ill

There

is

confirmation for

my

thesis that the rise of erudite research

coincided with the creation of political thought by Thucydides. All the

evidence

we have seems

to point to the conclusion that

history, as well as studies of magistrates'

of proper names,

and of other monuments of time in the

written for the

first

No

of magistrates

doubt

lists

and

They

made

existed as sciences before Thucydides.

work

when Thucydides

historical interest,

of Herodotus

in a different position.

As we have

and became part of

and genealogy were turned into erudite subjects

— or

century B.C.

the object of scholarly

seen, they con-

his LaioQia.

restricted history to political events,

Antiquarian research

were

registrations of local events existed

Ethnography and genealogy were

ditioned the

local

of religious ceremonies,

last thirty years of the fifth

long before that time, but had not been research.

lists,

books on

archaiologia

—was

But

ethnography

as well.

of practical impor-

The lists of the winners of the Olympic games prepared by Hippias and the lists of the priestesses of Hera at Argos and of the winners of the Carnaean games at Sparta compiled by Hellanicus contributed tance.

to the establishment of a better chronology in the issues raised or implied by

many

Greek world. But the

antiquarian studies were of even

The study of the origins of the cities, the comparison between barbarian and Greek laws and customs, the search for the first inventors of arts and crafts, led to an evaluation of greater theoretical importance.

The Rise of Antiquarian Research

human

civilisation.

Was

fire,

discovery of navigation, a

man had

tivity? If

63

the alphabet, the taming of the horse, the

gift of

Whereas

how

been the inventor,

chance? By imitation? By strugghng imitation of

whom

human

ac-

did he reach the resuh?

By

the gods or a product of

vs^ith

the gods?

was

If it

imitation,

and what?

historical research in the

Thucydidean sense banned these

problems, the Sophists liked them and passed them on to later generations of philosophers

names

of nations,

and

and he and

tutions of various cities

wrote on the

erudites. Hippias himself

Critias

produced descriptions of consti-

and regions. Hellanicus was not a Sophist,

though he made distinctions of a philosophic character 19, I,

quoted by Aulus Gellius

his erudite subjects

I,

z, 10);

(Arr. Diss. II,

but at least from their

titles

seem indistinguishable from those of the Sophists:

"About nations, names of nations, foundations of

cities

and nations,

laws of the Barbarians."

An

element of play and pastime was inherent in erudition from

inception.

When

a fifth-century B.C. writer produced a dissertation

about the parents and ancestors of the warriors

may be assumed

— or

it is

at least to be

in earnest. Erudite pleasure

is

hoped

who went

to Troy,

—that he was not

it

fully

always ambiguous. The erudite research

of the Sophists provided the necessary material for their views

man

its

on hu-

nature and civilisation and was therefore nearer to philosophy

than to any other subject. The systematic character of erudition was in tune with the systematic character of philosophy. Unfortunately

we

are

very badly informed about the theoretical writings of the Sophists on politics,

but

it

seems

likely that they

used their antiquarian research to

buttress their theories about law.

The connection between philosophic research and erudition was maintained in the fourth century. Plato was uninterested in history in the Thucydidean sense but encouraged research on customs and laws, to judge from his own work on the Laws and from the encyclopaedic activities of his pupil Heraclides Ponticus. The third book of Plato's Laws is an examination of the origins of civilisations according to the principles laid historical

down

by the Sophists.

What Diogenes

Laertius called

books by Heraclides, "On the Pythagoreans" and "On Dis-

coveries," are, in fact, antiquarian researches outside the

main stream

The Rise of Antiquarian Research

64

of history: "discoveries" are a typical subject for systematic erudition. In the school of Isocrates, history, a place

was

left

civilisation, or paideia,

which on the whole favoured Thucydidean

to erudition for the purpose of clarifying

was about: Ephorus,

for instance,

what

wrote about

was in the school of Aristotle that erudition and philosophy combined most closely. Aristotle based all his conclusions, and particularly those on politics, on "discoveries," heuremata. But, needless to say,

it

extensive systematic surveys of empirical knowledge. His pupils Theo-

phrastus and Dicaearchus developed their views on religion and isation

on the

basis of antiquarian research.

A

famous example

Theophrastus' survey of offerings and sacrifices to gods which

an attack against

sacrifices stained

tures of Aristotelian scholarship

is

with blood.

One

is

is

also

of the notable fea-

the combination of antiquarian re-

search with textual criticism and editorship.

where Theophrastus'

civil-

We

find

pupil, Demetrius of Phalerum,

it

in Alexandria,

was long

active.

Alexandria offered another remarkable combination: that of scholarship and poetry.

As Rudolf

Pfeiffer

has repeatedly emphasised, the

combination of love of poetry with scholarship

unusual. Alexan-

is

drian poetry in the third century B.C. and French poetry in the sixteenth century are the most obvious examples of

it.

Callimachus and

Apollonius of Rhodes pursued antiquarian research according to rules that

went back

to Aristotle, but they pursued poetry in a

manner

—to judge by the polemics between Callimachus and the PeripaPraxiphanes — did not always have the approval of

that

Aristotle's

tetic

disciples.

Thucydidean history declined men, such

in the third century B.C.

as Ptolemy, Aristobulus,

and Hieronymus of Cardia, went

against the majority of their fellow-historians store truth

and proportion

to the events of

legendary under the very eyes of those tions later Polybius rightly

drama and lack

felt

A few honest

when

they tried to re-

an age which was becoming

who

lived in

it.

A

few genera-

that during the previous century love of

of practical experience

had given

political history a

turn for the worse. Erudition prospered where political history was in decline.

Egypt produced practically no serious

the

King Ptolemy, but became the centre of antiquarian research.

first

political historian after

Philosophic interest continued to support erudition.

One

of the

most

The Rise of Antiquarian Research

65

important results was the notion of bios, of

"life,"

which could be ap-

whole nation. To write the per-

plied either to the individual or to a

was not new. In the fifth century Ion of Chios and Stesimbrotus of Thasus had provided sketches of their contemporaries. The few extant fragments show Ion of Chios to have been a delightful raconteur. Biographies had been written in the fourth censonal story of an individual

We

tury.

have one, Xenophon's Agesilaus, or perhaps two,

if

take

Euagoras as a primitive type of biography. Biographies,

Isocrates'

however, multiplied only in the Alexandrian age, and there

any doubt that the Peripatetics were largely responsible for

opment. They were interested

and

in types,

study of biography was to them a study in tyrants, artists, poets,

This

we

is

and philosophers

hardly

is

this devel-

in the last analysis the

human

They studied

types.

in biographical form.

not the place to discuss the problems connected with the de-

velopment of Greek biography; nor

this the

is

moment

to decide

whether biography was history to the Greeks, though no ancient authority includes a biographer tain (as Friedrich

Roman

among

Leo explained

in

the

good

190 1)

is

historians.

What

is

cer-

that in the Hellenistic

and

periods biography was written in two forms, as either chro-

nologically ordered biography or systematically organised biography.

The latter interests us here. The lives of politicians and generals were usually written chronological sequence.

much type,

in if

common

we

can see in Plutarch that such

proper

lives

had

with ordinary political history of the Thucydidean

disregard the fact that ordinary history of the Thucydidean

type did not include ists,

We

in

many

biographical details.

and philosophers were often written

The

lives of poets, art-

in a systematic

way, exam-

ining in succession the various aspects of a given personality. Diogenes

Laertius provides lives of philosophers of this type; and

it

was one

of

more speculative aspects of Leo's theory on Greek biography that when Suetonius wrote his lives of the Caesars in a systematic order he transferred to men of action a form of biography that had originally been meant for writers and artists. The biographical form we find in Suetonius and Diogenes Laertius is certainly in keeping with Alexandrian antiquarianism, indeed it had all the characteristics we associate with antiquarian research. It must the

The Rise of Antiquarian Research

66

be compared with the biographical information that the hbrarians of

Alexandria included in their tables or guides, Pinakes.

was

It

also the

type of biography which was not confined to the study of individual lives.

Dicaearchus wrote a

ro's Life

Roman

of the

life

which was imitated by Var-

People and perhaps also by another Life of

Greece attributed to a Jason. distinction

of Greece,

between primitive

true that Dicaearchus

It is

and

life

civilised life,

length the distinctive features of primitive to see through rose-coloured

glasses.

times, he seems to have paid

little

life,

made some

and he discussed

at

which he was inclined

But when he came to more recent

attention to chronological order

and

to have proceeded to a systematic description of Greek customs and institutions in the Suetonian

manner.

in

Romans were

by-product of this sys-

work by Varro, Imagines or Hebwhich seven hundred portraits of Romans and non-

tematic and erudite biography

domadeSy

A curious

is

the

collected, each with his

Historical research in

its

own

eulogy.

antiquarian form was also distinguished

by the extensive use of charters, inscriptions, and monuments. Serious historians

from Thucydides to Polybius, from Fabius Pictor to Tacitus,

occasionally availed themselves of archives, but not one of

them ever

began writing a history by a systematic search of the documents. Not

who was under

even Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Varro, thought in

it

necessary to

Roman archives.

make

there. Erudites, (j)i>i6XoYOL,

documents.

Aristotle's

was founded upon

a thorough study of the material

Historians seldom went to archives, and even

rarely did they quote in extenso the

found

the influence of

work on

documents they happened to have

made

it

their business to

assemble

the dramatic performances in Athens

the original records. Craterus, perhaps his younger

contemporary, copied and published Attic decrees (Jacoby,

Polemon wrote

Hist., no. 342).

and we know that

at least in

a

work "on

one case he quoted an Attic decree

The work

Fragm. Hist. Graec.

chronologists

founded upon the exploration of public records

as

lists

the

of magistrates (for

fifth

Ill,

138).

lares, libri

He

Gr.

liter-

of Hellenistic

— such

which Hippias had provided the example

century). Later Varro used official

etymologies.

Fr.

inscriptions city by city,"

ally (C. Miiller, is

more

documents

in

in

support of his

delved into censoriae tabulae, commentarii consu-

augurum, carmina saliorum, and so

forth.

The Rise of Antiquarian Research

67

monographs and general handbooks. Herodotus, of course, had examined with care the monuments he saw. But Thucydidean historiography was sparing in its use of evidence from monuments; and after Thucydides the study of archaeological and epigraphical evidence was never again part of the business of the ordinary historian. By way of compensation the old type of geographical description, the periegesis, was transformed to satisfy the needs of antiquarian research on monuments. The geographer often became an antiquarian. In the second century B.C., Polemon probably called himself a periegetes: he was in fact a learned guide, the remote predecessor of Burckhardt's Cicerone. The antiquarian monograph could be so narrow as to include only the monuments of the Athenian acropolis or so wide as to embrace the whole of Greece which is what Pausanias almost did. Polemon went even beyond Greece and wrote on Samothrace and Carthage. Local histories became full of antiquarian details, and the greatest of the local historians of Athens, Philochorus, was also one of the most active writers of monographs on Attic inscriptions, religious institutions, and other antiquarian subjects. We may take these monographs as the by-products Statues, temples, votive objects,

were

illustrated in

of his Atthis.

IV To sum up what

I

cannot here discuss

lines in Hellenistic erudition.

literary texts.

The second

is

One

is

in detail,

we can

main and commenting on

the editing of

see five

the collection of early traditions about in-

dividual cities, regions, sanctuaries, gods, and institutions. the systematic description of

The fourth chronology.

is

the compilation of learned biographies,

None

Hellenistic age,

Some

monuments and copying

of these types of research

historical research

original evidence

third

is

of inscriptions.

and the

fifth is

was absolutely new

and none was invariably treated

of the subjects

The

in the

in a systematic

way.

which we should nowadays put into the centre of

were

left

to the erudite scholars.

about the past, they studied the

They

dealt with the

earliest manifesta-

tions of civilisation, they kept closely in touch with philosophy,

deed they were the professional biographers.

and

Political historians

in-

took

The Rise of Antiquarian Research

68

cognizance of these subjects only marginally and therefore were unable to present history in a wider context.

seldom

On

the other

hand

the erudites

tried to connect their subjects with political developments.

should not care to be asked for a simple judgement on the

I

'

differ-

ence between the erudition of the third century B.C. and the erudition of the succeeding

two

methods was somehow world

tic

in

affected by the general decline in the Hellenis-

the second and

Romans. Bigger

themes and

centuries. Clearly the continuity in

first

factors than

centuries B.C. under the pressure of the

mere

intellectual limitations

and mistakes

explain the obvious lack of creativeness which one notices in large sectors of the historiography cially of the first first

and the erudition of the second and espe-

century B.C. In particular the historical studies of the

century B.C. are more conspicuous for their encyclopaedic char-

acter,

both on the

inality of ideas:

were

dorus,

political

and on the erudite

side,

than for their orig-

Alexander Polyhistor, Castor, Trogus Pompeius, Dio-

comprehensive,

not

creative,

writers.

Roman

Yet

imperialism was not an entirely negative influence. Polybius and Posi-

donius are unthinkable without Rome, even as the wide horizons of the

Roman

orbis account in

some measure

for the

wide range of Alex-

ander Polyhistor, Trogus Pompeius, and Diodorus. Polybius recognised

Romans had made universal history possible. Furthermore, Romans themselves discovered a source of national strength in eru-

that the the

dition.

They brought

to the task of assimilating the

methods

of

Greek

scholarship a sense of urgency that must have surprised their Greek masters. Historical erudition

came

closer to politics in

Rome

than in

the Hellenistic world. Antiquarian research revealed to the

Romans

customs to be revived and precedents to be used. Emperors

like

Au-

gustus and Claudius were quick to grasp the advantages inherent in a well-exploited antiquarianism.

Varro inherited the esprit de systeme of applied

it

his Hellenistic forbears,

but

with a consistency, a strength, and a fullness of results that

overshadowed tounded, and

all

his

predecessors.

five centuries later St.

His contemporaries were as-

Augustine was

still

Twenty-five books dealt with the antiquitates rerum

under

his spell.

humanarum^ and

sixteen with the antiquitates rerum divinarum: the very parallelism of

the

two

series

is

something unknown to the Greeks. Varro liked to

i

al-

The Rise of Antiquarian Research

69

works with observations on miscellaneous subjects. His successors, from Suetonius to John Lydus in the sixth century, followed him in both directions. ternate systematic

Antiquarian learning remained a living inspiration in end: last

enough

it is

pagans

to

Rome

to the

mention the antiquarian erudition of the so-called

in the fourth century a.d., Servius,

Macrobius, Symma-

was never another Varro. That is, there was never again a situation in which the discovery of new facts was pursued so relentlessly and effectively as in the time of Caesar. In Rome, perhaps even more quickly than in the Hellenistic kingdoms, erudition became comthe end pilation, and compilation led to summaries, excerpts, scholia chus. But there

—

of vigorous creative research. Consequently the trend towards fusion of antiquarian

gustus.

A

and

became

historical research

insignificant after

Au-

historian with antiquarian interests like Dionysius of Hali-

carnassus remained an exception. Later Tacitus could derive good

marginal effects from antiquarian tiquarians, indeed, kept

up

details,

but nothing more. The an-

their traditional link

with the philosophers:

from Varro to Macrobius many of them were interested but none seems to have been an original thinker. antiquarian research was

made

philosopher

who

significant that

to contribute to religious polemics

both on the pagan and on the Christian

man

It is

in philosophy,

side.

But perhaps the only Ro-

used antiquarian research to establish

osophic propositions was

St.

Augustine: and the

new

new

phil-

propositions

were such as to render further antiquarian research superfluous. Research on antiquities did not suffer total interruption ern Middle Ages, to which

I

should

like to confine

my

in the

West-

remarks. En-

cyclopaedias (such as that by Isidore of Seville) transmitted general

notions about classical antiquity. The systematic description of tutions

and customs did not disappear

were the subject of constant tiquities

—the

scriptions

Mirabilia

curiosity,

— are

altogether.

The

ruins of

insti-

Rome

and the descriptions of such an-

specimens of a systematic survey. In-

were collected occasionally; individual monuments or gems

were examined. Ecclesiastical historians used inscriptions and other antiquarian evidence to establish their claims. In the ninth century Agnellus of tificalis.

Ravenna

is

a specially notable

William of Malmesbury's

De

example with

his

Liber Pon-

antiquitate Glastoniensis Eccle-

The Rise of Antiquarian Research

70 siae

is

and better-known work

a later

and

quantitatively

of the

same

genre. But both

was too

qualitatively this type of research

restricted j

The cultivation of sysabeyance from the middle of the

to be of real consequence for historical studies.

tematic antiquarian research was in

seventh century to the fourteenth century.

A few

examined

facts stand out. In the fourteenth century Petrarch

ancient literary sources with a care for details of language and history

He

that

had not been equalled

man

coins to correct or supplement literary evidence. His friend Gio-

vanni Dondi

made

since the fourth century a.d.

a detailed study of

monuments with

used Ro-

a scientific

technique such as no ancient antiquarian had ever used. In the matter of

Roman

topography, as in

many

other subjects, Petrarch

indebted to the mediaeval tradition: the Mirabilia were tative for him.

But he had found a new method which

two generations was bound to bring about with Mirabilia and mediaeval encyclopaedias. the next

Boccaccio's Genealogia culis

Salutati's

still

pretation. Biondo's

new and

long to a

Roma

different

Triumphans and world

potentialities. Politian's case

is

De

laboribus Her-

He

of inter-

Miscellanea be-

Petrarch's

the simpler.

authori-

a complete break

Politian's

—they develop

heavily

in the course of

show an obvious dependence on mediaeval methods

still

its full

Deorum and

was

method

to

imitated in the

Miscellanea the combination of antiquarian and philological research

which Aulus Gellius had displayed ference

is

result,

He

deliberately tried to revive Varro's Antiquitates.

which was perhaps somewhat

Varro, became the prototype of

Rome.

stitutions his

most

dif-

was so much more accurate and intelligent than AuBiondo revived ancient forms that had disappeared a thou-

sand years before.

cient

Nodes Atticae. The main

that he

lus Gellius.

The

in the

all later

Roma

original

Instaurata to

work

from the original

antiquarian research on an-

Roma Roman

After having devoted his

and

different

Triumphans to

Roman

in-

topography, he produced

in the Italia Illustrata.

Others followed Biondo

with similar researches on Germany, Spain, and Britain. Biondo

rig-

orously separated antiquarian research from history, though he was also interested in the latter

and was indeed one of the founders of me-

diaeval history with his Historiae ab inclinatione Politian

was

the master of the

new

Romanorum.

Just as

research on individual details,

1

'

The Rise of Antiquarian Research

71

Biondo was the forerunner of the systematic antiquarian handbooks, the founder of

modern

scientific research

on the

antiquities of

all

the

countries of Europe.

V The infamous word "Renaissance" has

a precise

meaning when ap-

and sixteenth

plied to the historical research of the fifteenth

centuries.

was called back to life: the ancient erudite research as a discipline of its own, not to be confused with history. In the fifteenth century the term "antiquarius" acquired the meaning of "stuSomething

really

dent of ancient objects, customs, institutions, with a view to reconstructing ancient

Feliciano called himself "antiquarius" in

life." Felice

that classic text of fifteenth-century antiquarianism, the lubilatio. Phi-

lology

and antiquarianism had been inseparable

were again inseparable

what extent was renewed in to

more difficult to decide between philosophy and antiquarianism and sixteenth centuries. The antiquarians

in the Renaissance. It

the old link

the fifteenth

normally brought strong religious,

on

their

artistic,

work. There were antiquarians

Pomponio

in antiquity; they

Leto). Others (such as

is

and

who

political

liked

views to bear

paganism (such

as

Guillaume Bude) were concerned

with the relations between Hellenism and Christianity. The majority

looked upon Antiquity as a model for

and admired

Roman law and

a revival of ancient

art, architecture,

institutions.

forms of

life: it

and

festivals,

Antiquarianism appealed as

helped nations to self-confidence

by rediscovering their ancient traditions. The emulators of Biondo in

Germany, Spain, and Britain contributed to the formation of nationalism in their respective countries.

Theorists of history at

and

later declared

it

first

ignored antiquarian research altogether

history of a different

and

less perfect class. In

1605, after having distinguished between Antiquities, Memorials, and Perfect History, Francis

Bacon

called antiquities "history defaced or

some remnants of history which have casually escaped the shipwreck of time." The distinction was echoed by Gerard J. Vossius in his threefold division of antiquitates, memoriae, et historia iusta. The Thucydidean or Livian type of history

—the narration

in chronological

order of

The Rise of Antiquarian Research

72 political

and military events

—was held

esteem than the an-

in higher

tiquarian effort to reconstruct institutions and customs systematically.

Hybrids combining

historical narration with systematic research

with

Rome

or Greece as a

ethnography and local cient ethnography

and

my

knowledge these were not concerned whole. They were to be found in works of

did exist, but to the best of

history.

We

local history

than with historical works.

have seen that in Greece, too, an-

had more

Tommaso

can provide an example. The

first

affinity

De

Fazello's

with antiquarian

rebus siculis (1558)

work

part of the

is

arranged, not

chronologically, but geographically as a survey of the cities of the

The second part is a history of Sicily. While the philosophic and theological implications

is-

land.

of antiquarian

research were often vague in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, they

became much more

definite in the following century.

As

I

have men-

tioned in connection with Peiresc, the antiquarians thought that they

were applying Galileo's method to the study of the past. after Peiresc,

Two generations

Giovanni Giusto Ciampini made antiquarian research a

part of the activities of his

Roman Accademia

ftsico-matematica. In

the seventeenth century political and religious controversies

had an

adverse effect on ordinary historical studies. Pyrrhonists were asking loudly whether historical books could be considered

more than

parti-

san views of events. Ordinary historians faced discredit for their services to dynastic

and sectarian causes. But the antiquarians were not

involved in this discredit. They maintained the attitude of uncommit-

They felt that they belonged to an international brotherhood. Religious and poHtical differences represented no barriers for them. Their answer to the doubts about the reliability of history was

ted scholars.

to point to evidence of undisputed authenticity ings, inscriptions.

The Pyrrhonist

F.

W.

—

coins, statues, build-

Bierlingius

went so

far as to in-

sinuate that even coins were subject to contrasting interpretations, and

G.-Ch. Le Gendre admitted that "marble and bronze sometimes

But Addison replied that author."

And

"it is

much

safer to

fie."

quote a medal than an

Charles Patin added that by their objectivity ancient

coins help the historian to control his passions.

would be naive to accept the antiquarians' claims of impartiaHty their face value. The antiquarians did in fact use more literary eviIt

at

The Rise of Antiquarian Research

73

dence than they cared to admit, and they were more involved in reUgious and dynastic poUcies than they should have been to preserve their impartiality.

Antiquarian books devoted to the relations between

Paganism, Judaism, and Christianity became fashionable. They were written by erudits in

full

command

of

all

the relative evidence; and

what strange books they often were: the authors, such as Athanasius Kircher, combined learning with all sorts of theological views. Another common type of antiquarian book was that in support of dynastic or ecclesiastic claims to ancient origins or privileges: the political battles

between princes and those between

ecclesiastical seats

were often

fought by antiquarians with antiquarian weapons. Jesuits and Benedictines notoriously tried to

undermine each

ering forgeries in the opposite camp.

It

other's

ground by discov-

remains true, however, that the

introduction of antiquarian arguments represented a definite improve-

ment tives

in ecclesiastic

and dynastic controversies. Sophistry and invec-

were discouraged as being of no

inscriptions

and archival documents.

brochius, produced his

De

avail against a

When

re diplomatica,

methodical use of

Mabillon, to refute Pape-

Papebrochius was the

first

The Carmelites, who did not respect the game and had Papebrochius condemned by the Spanish In-

to congratulate his opponent. rules of the

quisition (1695) because of his doubts about the antiquity of their Order,

were discredited

in all learned circles.

VI If

a distinction has to be

made between

religious persuasions in the

would suggest that the Catholics came to rely rather more than the Protestants on inscriptions and coins and archaeological evidence. The Protestants had field

of antiquarian studies in the seventeenth century,

I

used Bible criticism and the study of the Fathers to buttress their po-

The initiative in the criticism of literary texts was theirs. Richard Simon deluded himself when he thought that he could carry Bible

sition.

criticism into the Catholic

camp: Bossuet, with an eye to Spinoza, de-

cided that his attempt should be exposed and punished. inscriptions, relics,

and

had good reason to

liturgy

were a new area

trust themselves.

in

Monuments,

which the Catholics

They had the advantage

of con-

The Rise of Antiquarian Research

74 trolling

They

Rome, with

its

wealth of pagan and Christian documents.

also sensed, quite rightly, that archaeology

many,

if

not

Catholics

all,

felt

traditions. Furthermore,

was

likely to

bear out

under Protestant pressure the

— and

the need to eliminate late accretions to their cult

here again antiquarian research could help.

Rome became

a centre of

antiquarian research on early Christianity; and in 1632 A. Bosio's

Roma sotterranea,

the

study of Christian

first classic

modern

Raffaello Fabretti, the founder of

Ciampini worked dictines of St.

Rome

in

Maur

fail

epigraphical methods, and

in official capacities. In

France the Bene-

increasingly monopolised antiquarian studies.

The achievements could not

Rome, appeared.

of the antiquarians of the seventeenth century

to attract the attention of the ordinary historians.

171 5, in his projects for a

About

reform of the Universities of Padua and

Turin, Scipione Maffei indicated the necessity of introducing the study of inscriptions, coins,

and charters

as part of the historian's training.

Later in the century A. L. von Schlozer and

J.

tingen the centre of a historical school in which the

was

officially

made Gotantiquarian's work

C. Gatterer

recognised as ancillary to historical research.

The use of inscriptions, research was far from being

In other places historians were slower. coins,

and charters

common

for ordinary historical

in the late eighteenth

and

early nineteenth century. After all

about 1850 Grote's History of Greece was written mainly on literary evidence: inscriptions counted for little, archaeolog-

even as ical

ever

late as

remains for even

less.

Neither Grote nor Boeckh nor Burckhardt

saw Greece. Moreover,

cal research did

the use of nonliterary evidence in histori-

not necessarily

mean

that the ordinary historians were

ready to shoulder the specific problems dealt with by the antiquarians.

Many

historians

political

history.

who

used nonliterary evidence remained interested in

and military history rather than

The form

of their historical

in institutions

and

in cultural

books continued to be the chro-

nologically organised "story," while the antiquarians remained faithful to their systematic

handbooks and

to their miscellaneous dissertations.

There were further complications tiquarians

had gained the respect

of

in the situation.

many

of their use of nonliterary evidence, they

Though

the an-

historians by the soundness

had

also

made new and dan-

gerous enemies. They were no longer able to rely on the traditional

al-

The Rise of Antiquarian Research liance with the philosophers.

upon erudition and pened: "In France

.

carried .

.

75

The French Encyclopaedists declared war the day. Gibbon noticed what had hap-

the learning

glected by a philosophic age."

It is

and language of Greece were ne-

not possible to analyse here the rea-

sons for the Encyclopaedists' hostility to erudition. At any rate they realised that erudition as

it

had been

had ceased

in the days of Bayle.

an

to be

The

freedom of thought,

ally of

alliance

was severed

as a result

of the remarkable revival of Catholic scholarship in France

and

Italy

between 1690 and 1740. After Mabillon, Montfaucon, Tillemont, and Muratori

it

was

clearly difficult to accuse the Catholics of being ig-

much knowlThey had learned how to use

norant or uncritical. In learned disputes they showed as edge and

critical

sense as their rivals.

footnotes, once the favourite polemical instrument of Bayle. Therefore Voltaire abolished footnotes altogether.

On

clopaedists' attack against erudition turned

They

fully

tiquarians

on the meaning of

—law,

political institutions, religions,

history.

customs, inventions.

that the antiquarians studied

wrong way, by accumulating

insignificant details

them

in the

and ignoring the

between the forces of reason and those of superstition. One of

Voltaire's essential tenets in regard to history

was

that too

prevent the understanding of "I'esprit des tems et

One must admit that his

ples."

Ency-

recognised the importance of the subjects studied by the an-

They thought, however, struggle

a higher level, the

antiquarians had

become

attack

les

was launched

many

details

moeurs des peu-

at a time

when

the

a rather conservative body.

There was, however, no cogent reason

why

philosophic history

should not have been associated with erudition. Voltaire's hatred of the erudits

was not

the rule forever and everywhere. In

Italy,

Vico had

somehow prepared the way for a synthesis of philosophy and erudition. In Germany and England some historians soon combined the two elements. Winckelmann's History of Greek Art and Gibbon's Decline

and

Fall are the products of this

combination, and

we know how

con-

Gibbon was of being both an antiquary and a philosopher is, he was a philosophic historian with the antiquarian's love of

scious that

minutiae and nonliterary evidence.

had been made of historical studies a few years before French Revolution, it would probably have disclosed the following

If

the

a survey

The Rise of Antiquarian Research

76 situation.

ground

The methods

of antiquarian research were slowly gaining

but the philosophic historians were

in poUtical history,

still

minimum of were doing their work

trying to discover the course of civilisation with only a erudite research.

The antiquarians themselves

with the uneasy feeling, betrayed in their prefaces, of being oldfashioned. Only a few philosophic historians had boldly decided to

combine philosophy with antiquarianism; and the

results fully justified

their attempts.

In the course of the nineteenth century

became

Winckelmann and Gibbon

acknowledged masters: the two types

the

of historical research

acted upon each other and came near to synthesis. Mommsen built his Roman history on legal texts, inscriptions, coins, and study of old Italic languages. He did pioneer work of lasting imincreasingly

portance

in all these fields,

Germany

while firmly aiming at political history. In

especially, several theorists of historiography denied antiq-

uities the right to survive as

an independent subject.

F.

Ritschl, the

great Latin scholar, expressed his views in 1833; and thirty years later J.

G. Droysen simply omitted to give a place to antiquarian studies in

his theory of historical treatises

method. What matters more, the old systematic

about the four antiquities were gradually replaced by ordinary

historical expositions. K. O. Miiller

ogy instead of a handbook of

wrote a history of Greek mythol-

religious antiquities. L. Friedlander re-

placed by his celebrated Sittengeschichte the ordinary Private Antiq-

Romans. H. Kochly and others wrote histories of the of war instead of treatises on miUtary antiquities. The per-

uities of the

ancient art

fect fusion of antiquarian research

and Thucydidean history might

have seemed only a question of time. But somehow the fusion was never perfectly achieved. Something stood in

its

path.

was adamant. He wrote his Staatsrecht and Strafrecht in a systematic way and never condescended to become a historian of Roman institutions. He insisted on the theoretical soundness of his method: individual institutions are part of a whole and must be studied as such; this is the way to avoid Niebuhr's fancies

Mommsen,

for instance,

about archaic Rome. In case anyone

is

inclined to suspect

Mommsen

of merely reactionary views in the matter of historical method, to

add that Burckhardt,

in writing

both

I

hasten

his study of the Italian

Re-

The Rise of Antiquarian Research

77

naissance and his history of Greek civiHsation, used the descriptive and

method

systematic

of the antiquarians rather than the rigorous chro-

The theologians

nological order of the true historians.

for their part

never abandoned the systematic for the chronological study of Judaism

and Christianity (and were therefore often accused of being unable to century Eduard

understand history). Even at the beginning of

this

Meyer did not

between history and

hesitate to accept the distinction

antiquities.

Superficially the distinction

was

indefensible. Institutions

and

reli-

gious customs are clearly the result of evolution and can be treated his-

Mommsen's way

torically only in chronological order.

Roman

state as a Platonic idea

up

parts cannot stand

and of analysing

to criticism:

one of

it

in

of taking the its

constituent

his pupils, E. Taubler,

pointed this out in no uncertain terms. In the attitude of

Mommsen and those who shared his beliefs there was

no doubt a considerable element of

who

intellectual conservatism. Scholars

have received a juridical or theological education are notorious

both for their love of systematic treatises and for their unwillingness to seek historical explanations. Moreover,

German

nineteenth-century

historiography as a whole reacted against the eighteenth-century idea that the history of civilisation If

more important than

political history.

the typical historians of the eighteenth century are students of civ-

ilisation

in

is

—

^Voltaire,

German

Condorcet, Ferguson, Robertson

—the great names

historiography of the nineteenth century, from Droysen to

Treitschke, are mainly political historians. This statement could be qualified in a

hundred ways, but generally speaking

also explains

why Ranke

that

is,

insisted

on giving

to undiluted political history.

The

it

holds good and

priority to foreign policy, situation, at least in Ger-

many, was favourable to the continued separation between history

and

and antiquarian research on nonpolitical

political

subjects, such as

law

religion.

Yet

we can now

say with hindsight that the survival of antiquarian

was something more than a phenomenon of academic conservatism. Anyone who has tried to write a history of institutions or of

research

religion

knows

that

chronological order.

it is

not so easy to jettison the systematic for the

What Mommsen

only implied has

now become

a

The Rise of Antiquarian Research

78

basic tenet of sociology, anthropology, and

known

what

is

more vaguely

as structuralism. Institutions are interconnected, individual

laws and customs and ceremonies are explained by other laws and cus-

toms and ceremonies. Every

state or nation has a

dilemma tion,

is

here. Beliefs

and

and of law

no mere history has so

far

beliefs, of

as a whole.

institutions have a beginning,

and an end: we can and must write

history of religion

system of

which must be seen

institutions, of laws, of customs,

is

no longer

their history. In in dispute:

it

The

an evoluany case a

does

exist.

But

succeeded in conveying the inner coherence,

the meaning, of a political institution or of a religion. Antiquarians

were traditionally close to the philosophers because approach to institutions and

beliefs

allowed a

critical

their systematic

evaluation of the

the systematic approach in favour of the

The elimination of historical one would make

any criticism of a philosophic nature very

difficult.

principles underlying a system of law or religion.

and

to understand if

the emphasis

works such

as

is

criticise a

on

Mommsen's

I

all

think by

Staatsrecht or Jhering's

now we

beyond the realm of stitutions

are

all

aware of

way out

fact

is

of

that the

in recent times has

and

Geist des ro-

their authors preferred the

transient.

certain of finding a

dilemma

we going

and episodic evolution? Marvellous

mischen Rechts were possible only because

permanent to the

are

system of law, a religion, an institution,

transient

its

How

this

dilemma, though we are not

What I can add without going most common attempt to solve the it.

been to admit the structural study of

beliefs as the necessary

complement

in-

to a historical study

The more so because only a system of beliefs or institutions may be compared with other systems; and we are now all convinced that comparative methods help us to understand historical facts. I do not know enough about the history of sociology and anthropology to be able to say to what extent antiquarian studies contributed to the origins of modern sociology and anthropology. In some individual cases the relationship between antiquarian studies and sociology is obvious: Max Weber was, and felt himself to be, a pupil of Mommsen. Emile Durkheim was a pupil of N. Fustel de Coulanges, another foreof them.

runner of structuralism in his Cite Antique. In other cases the situation is

not so

clear.

W. Roscher,

the founding father of

modern

Staatswis-

The Rise of Antiquarian Research

was

senschaft,

the greatest admirer of Thucydides.

a fact that structuralism

of the antiquarians.

factory solution

With

Whatever the

ge-

between antiquarian and structural study may be,

netic relationship is

79

is

is

now

Whether

it

taking over the systematic approach

that will ultimately prove to be a satis-

another matter.

the gradual disappearance of the Thucydidean, or political,

approach to Everything

history, history

is

now

is

no longer confined to

capable of history,

as, in

one sense,

political events. it

was when He-

rodotus started the business of history. In that sense antiquarianism, being the counterpart of the political approach to history,

is

by

now

dead. But the task of systematic descriptions of institutions and beliefs is

not something which

sociology

is

may

easily

be written

off as useless.

The

rise of

certainly connected with the decline of antiquarianism be-

cause sociology

is

the legitimate heir of antiquarian studies.

It is

clear

that the three-cornered relationship between philosophy, antiquarianism,

and perfect history

is

now

being replaced by the relationship be-

tween philosophy, sociology, and

Comte, and the obstinate quarian approach to pupil

Max

Weber. In

not yet heard the

refusal of

Roman it.

Hippias has his successor in

Mommsen

institutions has

this sense

last of

history.

to

abandon the

anti-

been vindicated by

antiquarianism

is

alive,

his

and we have

CHAPTER FOUR

Fabius Pictor and the Origins of National History

I

So flict

far

it

has been plain sailing: Greek historiography exists; the con-

between the Herodotean and the Thucydidean tradition

in histo-

riography becomes obvious as soon as you begin to think about is

the secular conflict between the antiquarian and the historian.

go back to the obvious

in

my

the Tacitean tradition (that

last

is,

two

lectures

when

I

it.

So

I

shall

shall deal

with

with the tradition of political history

writing and political thinking deriving from Tacitus) and with the

new

type of historiography introduced by Christianity, namely, ecclesiastical history.

But Greek historiography

is

surrounded by large uncharted

territo-

ries in

which exploration has hardly begun. There are two zones into

which

I

should

make limited forays today. I want to deal briefly what the Greeks may have learned from the Per-

like to

with the question of

sians in the matter of history writing: this will involve the

sons which will soon become apparent.

I

also

want

Jews for

to define

rea-

what

the

met the Greeks. What unifies the two questions is of course the intermediary position of Greek culture between the East and the Roman West. But I should like this lec-

Romans knew about

history before they

ture also to represent an object lesson in the ars nesciendi, in the art of recognising the limits of our present knowledge.

The

original lecture

title

toriography to Rome."

80

was "Fabius

Pictor

and the Introduction of Greek His-

Fabius Pictor and National History

The

first

8i

question about possible Persian influences involves two

points of Greek historiography w^hich, in dict

each other: the use of documents

ability for the professional historian;

that sure sign of

more than one

sense, contra-

—that supreme sign of and the abuse of

respect-

storytelling

With, fiction.

illicit traffic

The second question about the pre-Greek stage of Latin history writing involves some very important aspects of Latin culture: how it suddenly jumped from a stage of crude annalistic writing in Latin to accomplished historical writing,

and then history.

in Latin;

and

first in

Greek (remarkably enough)

how it created the prototype of modern

The Greeks were never

national

able to produce a tradition of national

political history for themselves, for the simple reason that they

never politically unified.

was

It

easier for

them

to write

on Egypt or

Babylonia as political entities than on Greece as a political

Romans

entity.

The

—not the Greeks —transmitted to the Renaissance the notion

of national history. Livy

was

the master.

involves an attempt to clarify this

were

what

Our second

in the

Roman

question therefore tradition prepared

very important and dangerous development, the creation of na-

tional history.

II

We

all

know what

is

the traditional account of the rise of national

history in the Renaissance.

It

runs approximately like

this. In

conscious

imitation of Livy, Leonardo Bruni wrote the history of Florence,

Bembo wrote

antonio Sabellico and

the history of Venice, Giorgio

Merula wrote the history of the Visconti of Milan, and so

same way Enea

Silvio Piccolomini

Marc-

forth. In the

wrote the history of Bohemia, An-

tonio Bonfini the history of Hungary, Lucio

Marineo Siculo the history

of Spain, Polydore Vergil the history of England, Paolo Emilio the his-

tory of France. Politian ian humanists

was asked

made an honest

to write the history of Portugal. Ital-

living

from hawking national history

according to classical models. They sold the kings of the nations

this

new brand

of history to

and eventually roused the native historians to

competition. About 1500 Jacob Wimpfeling "videns Romanas, Venetas,

Anglas,

Pannonumque

et

Bohemorum

ac Francigenum historias

Fabius Pictor and National History

82 in dies

lectum

iri" first

encouraged a friend, then undertook himself, to

—

Epithoma rerum Germanicarum "ad gloriam Germanorum sempiternam." The Scots, too, unhke the Sassenachs, did not need to hire an ItaHan to write their national history in a Livian style. Though write an

he started later than Polydore Vergil, Hector Boece (Boethius) completed his Scotorum Historiae in 1527, seven years before the Anglica

was published. He was given a pension of fifty Scottish pounds until his promotion to a benefit of one hundred marks. Of course Boece forged some of his evidence, but at least he produced good homemade forgeries, not concoctions by a mercenary "polutinge our Englyshe chronycles most shamefuUye with his Romishe lyes and Historia

other Italyshe beggerye," as John Bayle said of Polydore Vergil.

There are obvious limitations Livy

is

real

enough

for the genesis of

more one thinks about First of all there

has

little

tative

to

in this account.

do with

is

it,

modern

The importance

of

national histories. But the

the less Livy one finds.

a type of humanistic picture of a nation

Livy. This

is

the type of

which

which the best represen-

Camden's Britannia. By way of an introduction Camden has

is

conventional chapters of historical narration on pre-Roman Britain,

Roman of his

Britain,

work

each place

is is

and the Anglo-Saxon and

later invaders.

But the bulk

of course a systematic description of Britain in

presented with

its

monuments, men,

which

institutions,

and

memorable events from antiquity to Camden's own day. Besides, there are chapters on the laws and institutions of the country as a whole. The systematic character of the exposition which anticipates certain feawould have been even greater in the tures of modern social history other work Camden planned and of which the so-called Remains of Britain gives us an idea. The prototype of Camden's Britannia is clearly Biondo's Italia lllustrata. I will pass on to Renaissance special-

—

ists

—

the old poser: did Biondo have a model? In his

Biondo was inspired by Varro's Antiquitates

what

St.

Roma

— or more

Triumphans, precisely

Augustine had told him about Varro's Antiquitates. But

know of a model for the Italia lllustrata. What concerns us here is that the Biondo-Camden

I

by

do

not

atic description of a nation is

type of system-

not only competes with the Livian type, but

often found to be inextricably

mixed with

the Livian type.

A limited

Fabius Pictor and National History

we have

mixture

already found in

far greater in other

works

a

is

Camden

himself. But the mixture

which scholars are inclined to

in

inspiration. For instance,

morabilibus

83

Marineo

De

Siculo's

combination of ordinary

is

find Livian

rebus Hispaniae me-

political history

with a sys-

tematic geographical and ethnographical survey, including a reasoned list

De

of Spanish saints. Admittedly

rebus Hispaniae memorabilibus

puts together the preceding works by Marineo on Spain, beginning

De

Hispaniae laudibus of about forty years before (1495). Marineo Siculo deserves further attention by Renaissance scholars, but the with

mixture of the Livian (annalistic) type and of the Biondo (systematic) type

beyond dispute. The same

is

true of Wimpfeling, though to a

is

lesser degree.

Ill

This

is

only the

first

complication in our quest for origins. The other

very obvious fact, only too often forgotten,

Empire national

is

were fashionable

histories

that in the late

—mere

Roman

summaries for

Rome, but complex narrations when the subject was provided by the newly emerging nations. Our humanistic historians knew of course their Jordanes,

they used mediaeval chroniclers, tique models.

The

trivial instance,

direct

who

who

in their turn

had used Late An-

and

indirect.

sincere

in his turn

for

Bede

tempt for predecessors. One particularly significant case in Latin.

As

I

danes

in a

he

is

in his con-

that of

Enea

Bohemica he used native chronicles

have never read them,

I

influenced by Late Antique models. But Silvio, besides

whom

and true historian") and William of

made an exception

Silvio Piccolomini. In his Historia

and Bede

Polydore Vergil, to give the

admires and follows both Bede ("than

had not seen more sound, Malmesbury,

and Bede. Besides,

influence of Jordanes, Gregory of Tours,

was twofold, being both most

Seville,

Gregory of Tours, Isidore of

cannot say whether they were it is

often forgotten that

Enea

being a great student of Biondo, picked up a copy of Jor-

Swiss library and

made

a

summary

of

it.

The Late Antique writers themselves, of course, worked within a tradition. It is enough to glance at Jordanes' summary of Cassiodorus on the Goths to

realise that

Cassiodorus quoted a string of ancient

Fabius Pictor and National History

84 writers.

We know

the importance of Josephus' Jewish Antiquities for

Cassiodorus from his Institutiones. Josephus ius" to Cassiodorus (i, 17, 15). In those

is

"paene secundus Liv-

Vivarium days, long

after the

composition of the Gothic history, Cassiodorus initiated and supervised the translation of the whole of the Jewish Antiquities. This gives

relevance to the remark by Jordanes {Getica 4, 29) in which he regrets that Josephus, "annalium relator verissimus," did not report on the origins of the Goths.

As

the structure of Josephus' Jewish Antiquities

Dionysius of Halicarnassus'

Roman

depended on

come back But only

Roman

we have

annalists,

to the world of the

Antiquities^

Roman

owed much

and Dionysius

in a sense

annalists to

gone

in turn

full circle

and

whom Livy belongs.

Josephus reminds us that there was another

in a sense.

dition

which counted

dition

which we can

in creating

call

mediaeval national history: the

sacred history, because

to

it

tratra-

includes the Bible,

Josephus, the Ecclesiastical History by Eusebius, Christian chronography, and the lives of saints. Neither Cassiodorus,

nor

his epitomist Jordanes,

tempted to

treat the

Goths

who was

who was

probably a

Roman, Goth, was ever

as a religiously chosen nation:

a

both were

Catholic, whereas the majority of the Goths were heretics. But

well-recognised fact that, in different ways,

and Bede introduce an element counts. Gregory

is

the

Gregory of Tours,

it is

a

Isidore,

of ecclesiastical history into their ac-

most inclined to quote the

Bible.

We

have

re-

peatedly been assured that Bede never quotes the Bible in his history.

account of the events between a.d. 410 and 597 is based on the Vita Germani by Constantius a saint's life and on

But even so that

De

his

—

—

Excidio et conquestu Britanniae by Gildas which

inspired by Jeremiah.

It

is

literally

has also been observed that Isidore presents

the kings of the Visigoths of Spain as the Lord's Anointed, as God's vicars.

IV Though in the Late

not

so

much

has been written on the Christian vision of history

Antique historians,

know enough about

my

impression

is

the various ingredients

that at present

we do

which they combined

Fabius Victor and National History

see the Late

Antique historians turning to the

to the historians of the Church, tions

—

tories.

we do know. historians of Rome,

works. But one fact forcibly emerges from what

in their

We

85

especially of the

We

do not

evident from

my

see

Jews

—

and to the historians of Oriental na-

in

order to build up their national his-

them turning

to the historians of Greece.

formulation, by historians of Greece

historians of Greece, not historians writing in

This fact suggests two problems:

I

mean

As

is

precisely

Greek about other na-

Why

were the Greeks

left

out in this intellectual operation, the creation of national history?

(2)

tions.

If it is

(i)

true that the Greeks were virtually left out of the Late Antique

national

histories,

is

this

also

true

of

the

Renaissance national

histories? I

begin with the second question, about the Renaissance.

know enough

make one

I

do not

two specific remarks which can help to focus future discussion. It would be foolish to take Polybius as a historian of the Greek world who, through Leonardo Bruni and subsequent Florentine historiography, contributed to the formation of modern national history. Bruni treated Polybius as a historian of Rome and derived from him the history of the First Punic War. On the other hand we cannot rule out a priori the influence of Xenophon's Hellenica on Bruni's notion of a national history: Bruni produced his Commentaria rerum Graecarum, a paraphrase of Xenophon, in the years in which he was finishing his Historia Florentini to

answer

populi. For our purpose

naissance scholars

made

history of a nation.

The was

it.

But

it is

I

want

to

irrelevant to discuss

a distinction

or

whether

in the

between history of a

The Romans had been both

a city

city

Re-

and

and a nation.

Florentines were both a city and a nation. Bruni, to say the least, entitled to turn to the Greeks.

How complex these things are can be indicated by the following two episodes, both connected with that remarkable

man whose name

I

Damianus a Goes to save us from problems of Portuguese pronunciation. Damianus a Goes in his Louvain days wrote a pamshall give as

phlet to demonstrate the wealth of Spain against the denigrations of the great geographer Sebastian Miinster. the

title

vain,

It

was published

in

1541 with

Hispania. Petrus Nannius, the professor of humanities at Lou-

commended

the

pamphlet with the remark that

it

imitated Thu-

Fabius Pictor and National History

86

cydides in giving an idea of the material wealth of a nation

which the Latin historians had often overlooked: "qua

— a thing

in re

utinam

aliquot Latini scriptores diligentiores essent, eaque in parte Thucydi-

dem

imitarentur." This

is

one of the most interesting compliments paid

to Thucydides as a political historian in the sixteenth century.

It

pre-

supposes his status as a historian of a nation. This status a Goes.

He

this feat in

is

confirmed by another anecdote concerning Damianus

on Ethiopians, and Arias Montano celebrated

also wrote

an epigram: Gentis Thucydides enarrat gesta Pelasgae

Romana Hie

alia ut

claret Livius historia

taceam sera data scripta senecta

Aethiopum Thucydides Livy

is

accepit

tells

famous

Goes received

nomen ab

historia

the history of the Greeks; for his

his

Roman

name from

history: a

his history of

the Ethiopians, to pass over the other writings of his old age.

In other

words the contribution

of

Greek writers of Greek history

to the development of humanistic national history seems to

me

an

open question. It is

open because Renaissance scholars no longer

realised

what was

obvious to ancient readers, namely, that neither Thucydides nor Xen-

ophon nor other

writers of Hellenica were historians of Greece.

They

were, and were considered to be, writers of contemporary or near-

contemporary history which embraced events of more than one Greek state

without ever involving the whole of the Greek nation. Thucydides

and Xenophon were were

in fact historians of a brief period of history

chiefly interested in describing

and explaining changes

ance of power between leading Greek in

Greek

literature

states.

and

in the bal-

There existed, of course,

continuous narrations of the political events of

in-

dividual Greek states from the origins. Especially in the fourth and third centuries B.C. scholars produced local histories of Athens, Sparta,

Boeotia, Thessaly, and Sicily from the beginnings. But they never had the prestige of real historians, they never

competed with Thucydides,

Fahius Fictor and National History

87

Xenophon, and Theopompus. They were curiosities and, in fact,

historians,

local

treated as collectors of local

tended to be antiquarians. Perhaps one of these fourth-century

the

Philistus,

historian

of

Sicily,

reached the level immediately below that of the "great" historians, but the best

compliment he received

vs^as

to be called "the

little

Thucy-

dides." Local history remained an inferior intellectual activity.

There was, however, one "great" historian history of the Greek nation from

schoolfellow of

Theopompus

its

at the

who

beginnings. This

tried to write the

was Ephorus,

the

School of Isocrates. But the Greek

nation was never a political entity, not even in the fourth century at the

Macedon when Ephorus wrote. Consequently Ephohistory in such a way as to include large sections of non-

time of Philip of rus shaped his

Greek events and was considered of Greece, by Polybius, a

a universal historian, not a historian

good judge

(V, 33, z).

Greek historians practised pure national history only

in so far as

they wrote about barbarian nations or encouraged barbarians to write

about themselves

we wanted

—

either in

Greek or

in their

own

native languages.

If

to follow in detail the formation of the study of national

Graeco-Roman world, we would have to examine the extant fragments of what was the very large ethnographic

history in the

whole of the

literature of the Greeks.

most spectacular persuaded the

But

results

it is

evident that the Greeks produced their

on the subject of national history when they

Romans on

the

one side and the Jews and Christians on

the other side to write their histories according to models at least par-

Greek. The Christians were a peculiar nation, yet undoubtedly a

tially

nation.

It is

took

tories

riography.

no accident, their cue

therefore, that the Late

from

Roman and from

The former was supported by

Antique national

his-

Jewish-Christian histo-

the political prestige of

Rome,

the latter corresponded to the religious situation of the time. Both, one

must add, were the

result of the

encounter of Greek historical thought

with strong national traditions.

The here.

I

strength of the biblical tradition shall, therefore,

in

no need of

illustration

devote the second part of these observations to

the clarification of the situation in

own

is

which the Romans created

their

national history and consequently contributed to the formation of

mediaeval and modern national history. The circumstances are more

Fabius Pictor and National History

88

curious and complex than

Fabius Pictor, the

first

is

usually recognised.

historian of

The

central figure

is

Rome.

V If

you and

I

read and occasionally write history,

Roman who

to a

tween circa 215 and 200

on Greek

lines

we owe

this habit

decided to write history in the Greek manner be-

was part

B.C.

His attempt to produce a

of the upheaval

which we

Roman

call the

history

Second Punic

War.

Quintus Fabius Pictor belonged to a distinguished branch of a great family, the gens Fabia,

which owed the surname Pictor

to

an ancestor

who had painted the Temple of the Goddess Salus about 300 B.C. Roman tribal customs did not encourage patricians to become painters, even

they confined their painting to religious subjects. In his youth

if

our Fabius did the things a

Roman

aristocrat

was supposed

fought against the Gauls about 225 B.C. (Eutropius

III, 5;

to do.

He

Orosius IV,

N. H. X, 71) and probably went on fighting against Hanhe was not too old for that. His embassy to Delphi after Can-

13, 6; Plin.

nibal,

nae

in

if

216 marks the new direction of

to consult a Greek oracle at an anxious time for 5;

XXIII, II, 1—6).

He was

He was sent there Rome (Liv. XXII, 57,

his activity.

probably also asked to sound out Greek

public opinion in relation to the alliance between Philip

V of Macedon

and Hannibal. Clearly he must already have been known

minded

piety, interest in

his diplomatic qualities.

no

Greek

civilisation,

We know

direct evidence that he

was

a

that he

member

for his broad-

knowledge of Greek, and

was

a senator, but

of priestly colleges.

we have Modern

him the forgery of Sibylline oracles, but in doing so they have gone beyond what can reasonably be conjectured. The prestige of his family, which later claimed descent from Hercules, would have been sufficient to give him access to priestly records in any case. After his solemn return from Delphi, of which Livy furnishes a characteristic description, nothing more is heard of him. He was the first Roman to piece together a connected account of the history of his own city when he published his work in the Greek Ianscholars have even attributed to

Fabius Pictor and National History

89

guage towards the end of the third century

during or after

B.C., either

the Second Punic War.

We speak of the Hellenisation of Roman culture in the third century Of

B.C.

course there was such a process. But

it

was not without some

Romans

very strange episodes. Twice, in 228 and in 216 B.C., the

suhed the SibylHne Books and were told to bury Greeks and a couple of Gauls. been offered for

this

double

the Celtic danger, but

No

con-

alive a couple of

satisfactory explanation has yet

sacrifice. In

228 the Romans may have

had no quarrel with the Greeks.

In

felt

216 Hannibal

was at the gates, but neither Greeks nor Gauls were a menace. The Romans never killed Carthaginians for religious purposes. It is, however, impossible to dismiss the thought that the sacrifice of two Greeks and two Gauls must have had some connection with past events of Roman history. The Celts had haunted the Romans for a long time, and the Greeks were the enemies of the Trojans and consequently of the Romans. With these sacrifices the Romans must have tried to placate hostile

forces of the past.

At the same time, they were

also trying to invoke

favourable forces of the past. In 217 the dictator Fabius

Maximus

promised to consecrate a temple to Venus Erycina. Eryx was the

and Venus was

ian sanctuary connected with the legend of Aeneas,

Aeneas' mother.

An

allusion to the Trojan past of

Sicil-

Rome was

clearly

207 attention turned to Juno Regina, the goddess whom the Romans had successfully transferred from Veii to Rome in their implied. In

mortal struggle against the neighbouring introduction of the cult of

nected by ancient sources

Ovid

{Fasti IV, 251)

origins of

Romans were aware

note that the

Asia in 204 was con-

as Virgil [Aen.

—with the Trojan

direct evidence that the B.C.,

Magna Mater from

— such

we

city. Finally,

I,

68; IX, 80) and

Rome.

We

have no

of this connection in

204

but the connection would certainly account for the introduction

of the cult into

We may

Rome.

well think the

Romans

slightly inconsistent

if,

in the

same

year 216 in which they killed a pair of Greeks, they sent Fabius to Delphi to enlist the help of a Greek oracle. True, Apollo

had been

a pro-

Trojan god, but that was long ago. Delphi was the religious centre of Greece. In the following years Apollo

was honoured

in

Rome by games

Fabius Pictor and National History

90

Greek type

of a

honour sung

in

{ludi Apollinares)

—

Later, in 207, the ceremonies in

.

— culminated

Juno an anti-Trojan goddess the Greek fashion by twenty-seven of

girls.

in the

hymn

The composer

of the

hymn was Livius Andronicus, the Grand Old Man behind the Hellenisation of Roman poetry. There may also be a Greek element in the introduction of the cult of Mens in 217 B.C. Wissowa interpreted it as a tribute to the Greek idea of Sophrosyne.

mind

The explanation

—played a part

is

not certain. "Mens"

Roman

in archaic

thought. But

one could separate the introduction of the appeal to the ApoUine

On

wisdom

cult of

I

Mens

— steadiness of

do not

see

how

217 from the

in

of Delphi in 216.

the level of confused emotions, cruel and superstitious ceremo-

vague longings for something new and wise, the Romans were

nies,

probing their Trojan past and

was not above

who may

Livy,

their

Greek connections. Fabius himself

the punctilious performance of religious

go back to an autobiographical note

rites.

To hear

in Fabius' annals,

Fabius wore a laurel wreath throughout his journey back from Delphi to

Rome: such had been

ties.

the

recommendation

of the temple authori-

Yet Fabius did not remain on the level of his contemporaries. In-

stead of simply reacting to the past in terms of religious ceremonies, he tried to explore

it.

Instead of simply consulting the god of Delphi, he

constructed a picture of

awe

tious

Roman

religion in

its

evolution.

The

supersti-

of the past he transformed into an urge for knowledge.

By

directing contemporary emotions into the channel of historical re-

search, he

became the

first

historian of

Rome. He turned what would

have been one of the innumerable episodes of

human

gullibility into

an

intellectual achievement.

Fabius was not alone in this effort to piece together the various stages of

Roman

history.

But there

is

some

difficulty in defining the

contribution of the other partners. Ancient sources are unanimous in

regarding Fabius as the

first

of the

Roman

historians,

and there

is

no

reason to depart from this opinion. As for the senator Cincius Alimentus, a praetor in

sume

we must

as-

was younger than Fabius and that he imitated him in his Rome written in Greek. The real puzzle is Cn. Naevius. He

that he

history of

was

211 and a prisoner of war of Hannibal,

older than Fabius, fought in the First Punic War, and late in

life

Fabius Pictor and National History

wrote a historical

poem about

it.

91

There are undeniable

similarities be-

tween him and Fabius. Both wrote mainly on the origins of

on contemporary events and gave

On

little

Rome and

space to the intermediate pe-

hand in the extant fragments there is no sign of Naevius' dependence on Fabius or vice versa. We are told that Naevius made Romulus a grandson of Aeneas, whereas Fabius took Romulus riod.

to be the

the other

grandson of Numitor. All that we can say

both Fabius and Naevius shared

Rome's

past. Naevius,

at present

in the effort to give

an account of

however, by choosing to write a

than a history, did not submit the

Roman

poem

is

characteristic of

historiography. Both Naevius and Fabius tried to give the

image of

their

own

past, but Fabius

image according to the principles of

rather

past to the process of ratio-

which

nal elucidation in the interest of truth

that

is

Greek

Romans an

was the only one to construct the Greek historiographical methods.

VI significant that Fabius

It is

wrote

in

Greek, while the contemporary

poet Naevius wrote in Latin. Livius Andronicus had shown that possible to turn Latin into a language for poetry of the

Naevius followed him. their

It

would have been easy

example and to create a Latin

history Latin literary prose

A

had been

than

in existence for at least a century.

down

in

280

B.C.

and

The funeral speech by Q. 220 was another famous piece. Ju-

in circulation long afterwards.

Caecilius Metellus for his father in

were of course common, not to speak of the Chronicle of

ridical texts

the Pontiffs to

the

for Fabius to accept

historical style. In fields other

speech by Appius Claudius had been written

remained

was Greek type, and it

which we

shall

soon return.

A

Latin style for history of

Greek type was within easy reach. Fabius preferred to write

in a

foreign language. I

div.

am I,

stating as a fact that Fabius wrote in

43) and Dionysius of Halicarnassus

But before I,

continue,

I

6) refers to Latin

from Fabius Latin text.

(e.g.,

None

I

must add that

Greek because Cicero {De

(I,

6, 2)

in other

say so categorically.

passages Cicero (De

leg.

annals by Fabius, and there are a few quotations

Aulus Gellius V,

4, 3) that

can only come from a

of our sources suggests that Fabius wrote both in

Fabius Victor and National History

92

Greek and

but neither does any of them suggest expHcitly that

in Latin,

the Fabius of the Latin history

was

a different

man.

I

we have

any satisfactory explanation of the evidence such as rich

Leo toyed with the idea that Fabius,

tory in Greek,

left

behind a draft

death. Others have

more

What

tions.

no evidence

Our

we have

can hardly be doubted

his history in

Greek and did

— but we can

so.

his-

after his

is

that Fabius intended to publish

We cannot say why he did so —we have

at least clarify the implications of his choice.

possessed before Fabius; as a historian of

having pubUshed his

which was edited

what types of chronicles what company Fabius came to

(2) in

(i)

how

find himself through writing in Greek; (3)

work

Fried-

other instances of such transla-

discussion will turn on three points:

Rome

it.

assumed that the Greek work was

plausibly

later translated into Latin:

after

in Latin

do not know of

Fabius envisaged his

Rome.

VII knows

two types of historical compositions existing in Rome before Fabius, and we shall have to consider them in turn. One was represented by the banquet songs, the other by the Chronicle of the Tradition

of

Pontiffs.

Cato mentioned the banquet songs

— something which

solete

custom

before

him (Cic,

and to

all

107

L.).

in

honour of great men

used to happen

Brut. 19, 75). Varro, too,

knew

many

as

an ob-

generations

of the banquet songs,

appearances Cato was not his source (Nonnius Marcellus

Varro has different

details

which we must regard

p.

as indepen-

dent confirmation. Cicero read about the songs in Cato's Origines and regretted their disappearance {Tusc. Disp. IV, 2,

As

is

well

known. Jacobus Perizonius was

quet songs a potential source for the

Roman

the

3). first

to see in the ban-

annalists.

Without know-

ing of his seventeenth-century predecessor, Niebuhr later

banquet songs the cornerstone of history.

made

his interpretation of early

the

Roman

According to him the Romans' legends of their origins were the

product of popular poets: the annalists, beginning with Fabius Pictor,

would have derived

their tales

from them. Macaulay's Lays were the

consequence. Niebuhr's theory was soon rejected and discredited by

Fabius Pictor and National History

Mommsen, and

93

there have been scholars

existence of the banquet songs. But

De

ory at the beginning of this century.

It

modern Itahan

of

works by

studies

Ciaceri, Pareti,

see

no serious reason

quet songs. But

on the

do not

I

quet songs in

Rome

could he have

Uterature and history, as the

is

now back

in

to Bowra's

He-

Macaulay's country.

for doubting that the

Romans had

their

ban-

believe that they exercised a strong influence

is

generally raised against the existence of the ban-

Cato spoke of them as no longer

that

known

kind are always dangerous.

know?

a characteristic feature

historical tradition.

The main objection

How

became

and Rostagni show. Thanks

roic Poetry the ballad theory I

have doubted the very

Sanctis revived Niebuhr's the-

Roman

on

who

A very plausible

that they

How

existing.

had existed? Questions of

this

we know how Cato would however, be made as to Cato's

can

suggestion can,

possible channels of information.

Decemviral legislation included a law against "mala carmina," obnoxious songs. The nature of these carmina

among modern cients.

But

if

was already a source decide which carmina

scholars and

you have

to

must know which carmina are permissible. jurists

the

a matter of dispute

is

I

of

doubt for the an-

are obnoxious,

Roman

suggest that the

discussed the various types of carmina and thereby transmitted

knowledge of the existence of banquet carmina. The

commentator on the Twelve 200

you

B.C.

He may

first

eminent

Tables, Sextus Aelius Catus, wrote about

well have been Cato's source of information.

Me-

diaeval analogies take us even a step further. Banquet songs to cele-

brate heroes might easily be turned into songs to castigate enemies. Icelandic legislation prohibited almost every kind of

poem on

uals in order to prevent the composition of satirical

poems.

not be surprised

if

there

had been

in

Rome some

tween the decline of banquet songs and the tion

individI

should

direct connection be-

rise of

decemviral legisla-

on "mala carmina."

So much for the existence of the banquet songs and one possible cause of their decline. But Fabius Pictor preceded Cato by only one generation.

What was

lost

many

considered lost for Fabius. There

generations before Cato must also be is

clearly a strong reason a priori for

doubting that the carmina were available to Fabius, even

if

we

are pre-

Fabius Pictor and National History

94

pared to believe that a member of the gens Fabia would accept as authoritative

carmina celebrating members of other

families. This argu-

ment a priori can be reinforced by a piece of direct evidence. The presupposition of the banquet song theory is that unknow^n poets canonised the

Roman

legends before the annalists stepped

hence the annalists received the canonical

tales

from the poets.

one case involving Fabius we can prove that the canonical than the

rise of

Roman

in:

Now in

tale is later

historiography. In the last century of the Re-

public a well-defined tradition circulated about Coriolanus. Dionysius,

who

tells

the story at great length, volunteers the information that

mulus, Remus, and Coriolanus were celebrated in hymns 62).

He

(I,

Ro-

79, 10; 8,

does not say whether the hymns were ancient nor whether they

were banquet songs.

We cannot use his text as proof of the rediscovery we must assume contents of these hymns

of ancient banquet songs in the age of Augustus. But

that there

was no disagreement between

the

and the current legend of Coriolanus: the disagreement would have been noticed. Indeed Livy noticed that Fabius had a version of of Coriolanus' story sci killed

(II,

his

own

40, 10). While in the traditional story the Vol-

Coriolanus when he refused to lead them against Rome,

Fabius' version Coriolanus died an old

man

in exile.

in

According to Fa-

was more painful in old age. It is therefore clear that the ordinary version was not yet canonical before Fabius. If there were hymns about Coriolanus, either they were later than Fabius or they did not affect him. The legends of early Rome were still evolving in the age of Fabius and became stereotyped only in the second, or perhaps in the first, century B.C. The theory of the banquet songs explains very few of the facts known to us about early Roman tradition. There is certainly no reason to believe that Fabius used bius, Coriolanus once

remarked that

exile

them.

The Annals

of the Pontiffs were a

much more

solid reality in the

time of Fabius. To begin with, they existed. Second, whatever they

may

have contained, they were annals. They ordered their material according to years and gave the

names

of the consuls of each year. In adopting

the annalistic form and the consular dates Fabius evidently

had the ex-

Though he

did his best to help his

Greek readers by translating some basic dates

for instance, the foun-

ample of the

pontiffs before him.

—

Fabius Pictor and National History

dation of

Rome

95

—into Olympiads,

his general

system of chronology

is

Roman, not Greek. The real question is whether the pontifical Annals could give him more than the names of the consuls. As is well known, the pontiffs registered what mattered to them on a whitewashed board, the tabula dealbata, which was changed every year and had the form of a calendar. Everyone was free to inspect it. At the end of each year the contents of the relevant tabula must have been transcribed into a

scroll or a

codex and automatically became

part of a chronicle which presumably preserved the calendar form. Finally, this chronicle

was put

into order

and apparently published

in

eighty volumes at the end of the second century B.C.

Cato the Censor thought that a historian would not ful

information in the Annals of the Pontiffs (Aulus Gellius

According to him they recorded only famines, tents. is

much

find

Cato was

a difficult character

II,

use-

28, 6).

and other por-

eclipses,

and liked to be outrageous. But he

very precise in his indictment, and his evidence cannot be dismissed

lightly.

He

says that the Annals did not give any direct information

about military and Servius,

who

military

and

state

political events.

more or

Cato

is

contradicted by Cicero and

less definitely that the pontiffs registered

maximus

political events. Cicero says that the "pontifex

res

omnis singulorum annorum mandabat

his

context shows that he means military and political events. Servius

is

even more

specific: the registration

marique gesta per singulos dies"

litteris"

[De

or. II,

52),

and

included "domi militiaeque terra

(Serv.

Dan. ad Verg. Aen.

I,

373).

The contradiction between Cato and Cicero does not necessarily imply that one of them must be wrong. Both may be right, if they refer to different stages in the evoluton of the Annals. final edition

Cato wrote before the

and publication of the Annals about 120

B.C.;

Cicero and

the source of Servius (perhaps Verrius Flaccus) wrote after their publication.

We may well

ask whether this circumstance

count for the contradiction between them and Cato. publication would in any case necessitate a certain

work. Notes hurriedly put

down

is

not

It is

obvious that

amount

in different centuries

likely to ac-

of editorial

could not be

published without revision. The very evolution of the Latin language

made

the revision imperative.

If

we now

consider the discrepancy be-

tween Cato and Cicero-Servius about the nature of pontifical

registra-

Fabius Pictor and National History

96

we may

tion,

reaching.

suspect that editorial intervention

Did the

The

cordingly?

was

military

and

and

drastic

editors take to heart Cato's complaint

far-

and act

ac-

were exactly what Cato

political events

missed and Cicero and the source of Servius found

in the records of the

pontiffs.

So hard

far,

facts

ment

we have

of course,

which prove that

mere hypothesis. But there are

stated a

some

at

stage (not necessarily at the

mo-

of publication about 120 B.C.) the Annals of the Pontiffs were

manipulated, enlarged, and

falsified.

We know

from Cicero that the

Annals of the Pontiffs began with the origins of the

rum Romanarum. unusual

of foresight,

gift

was a later manae that

Unless

addition.

the

first

we

clear that the earlier part of the

it is

Then we read

in the so-called

tory (or prehistory).

it

It

also tallies with the

Romanae on

editor extended the Annals to Finally,

we have some

We know from Cicero the

first

{De

eighty,

Origo

that at a certain

mo-

much

before the year 350 ab

rep.

16, 25) that in that year

I,

registration of an eclipse.

plausible in so far as

long before the destruction of

his-

direct evidence that the authentic

discuss the chronological questions involved. is

a

embrace the legendary phase of

part of the Annals cannot have started

maximi made

reliability of the

we must assume

this point,

Roman

enormous number,

gentis

that his date

The Origo has

include the Alban stage of

books of the whole work. Granted the

the Annates

3; 5).

agrees with Cicero's formula ab initio re-

of the

urbe condita.

Origo gentis Ro-

as regards reliability, but this piece of information de-

rum Romanarum^ which may

Alba Longa.

Annals

four books of the Annals of the Pontiffs were con-

serves credence. Basically

ment an

initio re-

Romulus an

are prepared to attribute to

cerned with events earlier than Romulus (17,

bad reputation

ah

city

Rome

it

It

will

I

shall

not

be enough to say

takes us to about

400

B.C.,

not

by the Gauls. The pontiffs prob-

ably lost their archives on that occasion, but they

may

easily

constructed the lost tabulae, combining the events of the

last

have

re-

few years

preceding the disaster. There was a total eclipse in 400 B.C. which was certainly not forgotten by 390.

To sum up tiffs

this discussion:

were manipulated. Their

much

it is

evident that the Annals of the Pon-

reliable section

can hardly have included

material referring to events earlier than 400 B.C.

We

do not

Fabius Pictor and National History

know when

97

the interpolations were

made. But the disagreement be-

tween Cato and Cicero about the contents of the Annals makes pect that the most serious interpolations were

hypothesis

this

maximi

nales

duced

is

we must assume

correct,

in the late third century

large the scope of their

There

made about 120

sus-

B.C. If

An-

that the editors of the

availed themselves of the various books of history pro-

and during the second century (Fabius

Hemina,

Pictor, Cincius Alimentus, Cato, Cassius

lae.

me

work and

to

fill

etc.) in

order to en-

the lacunae of the older tabu-

nothing impossible in the amusing suggestion that the

is

pontiffs, after

having contributed to the

ransacked the works of the

Roman

rise of

Roman

historiography,

historians to improve their

own

Annals before publication.

On this hypothesis the Annals, to Fabius

were much poorer

They provided mentioned

or rather the registrations, accessible

in content

than those

known

to Cicero.

They must have wars, and peace treaties whenever such

the essential chronological framework.

defeats, victories,

events occasioned religious ceremonies or were connected with portents.

But they did not yet regularly record military and

would not have been able

events. Fabius facts as they

to piece together

from such

contained a coherent account of the history of

fore the First Punic War.

Rome

Nor would he have found recorded

those individual heroic actions which are an essential part of

man

tradition.

Whatever view we take

available to Fabius,

political

we must

be-

them early Roin

of the pontifical registrations

at least agree that

Mucins Scaevola, Cor-

Manlius Capitolinus, and other heroes were unlikely to have

iolanus,

been included.

VIII It

the

would seem evident

Roman

that Fabius decided to write in

historical tradition struck

him

Greek because

as unsatisfactory.

The ban-

quet songs were probably no longer in existence: he could have only a

vague idea of existed

their contents.

and were valuable

The

to him.

registrations of the pontiffs certainly

But they seemed restricted

disconnected in character, repellent in

style, as

in scope,

soon as they were com-

pared with the works of the Greek historians. To read Greek historical

Fabius Victor and National History

98

books was to discover not only that the Greeks practised a

different

type of historiography, but that they had already taught other nations to write history in

had something

Greek

Greek way and, furthermore, that they

about

specific to say

Rome

when Greek was

In the third century, isation

in the

from Judaea to Spain, everyone

The Greeks more than

itself.

the official language of civil-

tried to write history in Greek.

ever wrote about other nations, and the other

nations in their turn were stimulated to write about themselves in

Greek according to Greek standards. As

I

have already mentioned, un-

der the impact of Hellenisation the natives of

suaded to rethink

their national history

many

and to present

language to the educated readers of a multinational in a large,

and not always very

select,

countries were perit

in the

Greek

was Greek

society. Fabius

company when writing

his

annals.

Manetho wrote Egyptian history,

both in Greek,

history

and Berossus wrote Babylonian

in the first part of the third century B.C. Inter-

nationalism did not exclude nationalism.

Manetho wanted

to

show up

The development continued in the second half of the century and involved new nations. The Jews produced a Greek translation of the Bible. Then a certain Demetrius who lived under Ptolemy IV, towards the end of the century, summarised

the incompetence of Herodotus.

biblical history

and

tried to be precise in chronology. Flavius

believed that Demetrius

was

with Demetrius Phalereus

a

(c.

Josephus

pagan and may even have confused him

Apion.

I,

218). Internal evidence

and the

testimony of Eusebius [Praep. Ev. IX, 21) leave no doubt that he was

Menander of Ephesus was Demetrius' contemporary. Like him Menander was trained in the methods of Alexandrian scholarship. Menander wrote Phoenician history (Jos., c. Apion. I, 116). Nobody tells us that he was a Phoenician a Jew. There

is

good reason

to believe that

by origin, but he used native chronicles and apparently claimed to have

them into Greek. Perhaps Menander was no more of a Greek than Zeno the Stoic was. Demetrius was certainly, and Menander probably, a contemporary of Fabius Pictor. In comparison with them Fabius was exceptional only in the sense that he wrote the history of a state the rulers of which were not Greek. But if we knew more, we would probably recognise that

translated

Fabius Pictor and National History

99

even in this limited sense he was not really an exception. Etruscan histories existed

and were used by Greek and

least conceivable that

some

of

Roman

them were written

in

historians.

at

It is

Greek.

We should not be far from the truth if we said that Fabius wrote history in Greek because everybody else

was doing

so.

But there

is

some-

more to add. Greek was not only the language of historiography: had already become, before Fabius, the language in which specific

thing it

information about

Rome

could be obtained.

We

can overlook for the

Roman hisoccupation of Rome

present purpose the information about certain events of tory with international repercussions, such as the

by the Gauls, that had found

one Greek historian

way

into

works by Theopompus, Her-

and Theophrastus. But

aclides Ponticus, Aristotle, B.C.

its

set

in the third century

out to become the source of information

West and more particularly in Rome. With patient work which lasted for fifty years Timaeus of Tauroanyone interested

for

menium

in the

tried to satisfy the curiosity of his contemporaries

about the

We may even suggest that he did much to shape and direct their curiosity. A political exile from Sicily, he lived for the greater part of

West.

his hfe in Athens, self

from about 315 to about 265

B.C.,

and devoted him-

He

single-mindedly to the task of writing a history of the West.

work on

centred his Italy,

Sicily,

but extended his research to the whole of

Gaul, Spain, Libya, and even touched on the Northern countries,

about which he trusted Pytheas. Whereas he gave a complete history of Sicily, he confined himself to the geography of the other countries. Obviously he

political

and ethnography

was following the example

of

He-

rodotus, with appropriate adaptations.

Timaeus was olently,

had

a pedant,

haps

inclined to criticise his predecessors vi-

political prejudices,

word, he was one of natives,

was

us.

Like

and made books out of books. In

many

a

of us he also travelled, questioned

and quoted original documents. He talked about Rome, per-

in the lost first

books of

his

work, within the framework of

his

ethnographical research.

He had

not yet finished his history of

Sicily

when an

event of im-

portance confirmed that he had been right in turning his attention to the West.

275

The Romans became involved

B.C. they

proved their superiority

war with Pyrrhus. About over a Hellenistic army and

in a

Fabius Pictor and National History

lOO

made

clear that the Hellenistic

it

panding

bound

Western direction. The victory of the Romans was

in the

to create a sensation in the

maeus, Lycophron, expressed

which modern tury B.C.

summary

Roman

Hellenistic

kings,

though

was

old,

A contemporary of Ti-

Greek world.

his surprise in the

of Cardia considered

it

necessary to give a brief

history within the context of his history of the

which included Pyrrhus. But Timaeus himself,

alert

enough

to

produce an appendix to

containing an account of the wars of Pyrrhus in isfied

poem Alexandra,

have vainly tried to relegate to the second cen-

critics

Hieronymus of

monarchies had no chance of ex-

Italy.

his history,

He was

not

sat-

He went back to earlier stages of Rohistory. He followed up the developments of

with a mere factual history.

man political and cultural Roman policy until the outbreak such as

we have

more than

does not encourage the belief that

a rapid survey of the rise of

power. Timaeus

Roman

it,

of the First Punic War.

is

Rome

The evidence, Timaeus gave

to the status of a great

never referred to by our authorities for details of

political history.

But the mere

fact that

he was the

first

to de-

war between Greeks and Romans represented a revolution: the more so because he was so interested in the customs and legends of Rome. His information was good. He was able to get some

book

vote a

of his facts

to a

from natives of Lavinium

proved that

in the fourth

(fr.

59 Jacoby). Excavations have

century B.C., Lavinium had a mixed Hellenic-

Latin culture and was therefore a place for contacts between Greeks

work naturally became a landmark. Lycophron and Callimachus used him as one of their sources for the West. Fifty years after Fabius, Timaeus' work continued to be so much admired that Polybius was alarmed. He felt that in order to establish himself before his Roman public he had to make a determined effort to discredit his predecessor. Though he devoted a whole book to this enterand

Latins. Timaeus'

prise,

Varro and Cicero

parent

still

read their Timaeus with attention and ap-

relish.

Even the meagre fragments of Fabius' annals show that he learned from Timaeus.

Interest in national customs, religious ceremonies, pic-

turesque and anecdotal details,

maeus. His Greek dates are

in

is

as evident in Fabius as

Olympic

an admirer of Timaeus. The cultural

years, as

we would

it is

in Ti-

expect from

side of Fabius' annals

is

unthink-

Fabius Pictor and National History

lOI

able without the example of Timaeus.

The long description

of the ludi

magni, the fragment on the history of the alphabet, the notes on the integrity of the

Roman

"mores," recall Timaeus.

Roman

magistrates and on the severity of

He

gave Fabius the taste for the happy turn

of phrase, for the significant anecdote, for the antiquarian detail,

and

perhaps even for the autobiographical elements.

But Timaeus was not the only Greek fessor E.J.

Bickerman has taught us

in a

whom

Fabius studied. As Pro-

memorable

article {Class. Phi-

47, 1952, 65—81), the Greeks were specialists in the problems of national origins. They formulated the problems, collected the evilol.

They created a special literary genre, the "foundation of cities." Something about Aeneas' arrival in Italy and the founding of Rome had already been said by Hellanicus at the end of the fifth century B.C. The origins of Rome contindence, and reached conclusions for each nation.

ued to intrigue the Greeks seriously interested in the

know from

became

in the fourth century before they

development of the

a catalogue of historical

Roman

books contained

from Taormina that Fabius spoke of the

in

state.

We now

an inscription

arrival of Hercules in Italy

and

mentioned the founder of Lanuvium as a companion of Aeneas (G.

Manganaro, La Parola del Passato 29, 1974, 394—396): this reminds us immediately of Greek forms of narration. It is also our good fortune to

know that Fabius

native legend of rian.

admitted that a substantially correct version of the

Romulus and Remus could be read

Diodes of Peparethus. Plutarch

Romulus

(III, i)

famous passage of

Modern

the grounds that

easily

vour of Diodes'

histo-

his Life of

scholars have tried to undermine his state-

no Roman would go to

torian for a trustworthy account of the origins of his

argument can

Greek

emphatically asserts that Fabius followed the account

given by Diodes.

ment mainly on

in a

in a

own

a

Greek

his-

But

this

city.

be reversed, and there are other arguments in

priority. First,

des lived well before 150

B.C.

we know from another and

fa-

source that Dio-

cast his net rather wide, having also

written on Persia. Second, the discovery of an inscription from Chios

has confirmed that the Greeks were familiar with the legend of Ro-

mulus and Remus not long

known (N. M.

after

200

B.C.

So

far the inscription,

though

for at least twenty years, has been only partially published

Kontoleon, Akte

IV. Int. Kongr.

Epigraphik 1962, 1964, 192).

Fabius Pictor and National History

IQ2 It is

honour of

in

monument with

a

man who, among

other things, set up

some

sort of

a representation "of the birth of the founder of

Rome

Romulus and of his brother Remus." If the legend of Romulus and Remus was current in a rather remote part of the Greek world not long after

200

B.C., there

nothing remarkable in the fact that Diodes

is

should have been writing about

it

twenty or thirty years

earlier, in

time

homage to the mastery of the Greeks by accepting what they had written. Later Ro-

to be used by Fabius. Fabius paid in the

matter of origins

mans agreed with him. They kept

their national legend in the

Greek

dress transmitted by Fabius

and found

thought of improving on

Real disagreements with the story told by

it.

it

so congenial that they seldom

Fabius remained individual aberrations. To mention one, there was a certain writer, Egnatius,

Romulus. His opinion tis

is

who

ventured to suggest that

Remus

survived

recorded only in the disreputable Origo gen-

Romanae.

IX There

Greek ditions

is

historians.

He

tried to strike a balance

between the native

and the Greek accounts. That he could be independent

judgement

which

no suggestion that Fabius simply capitulated before the

is

is

in his

foundation of

Rome

with Timaeus. Being a Fabius, he was not

likely

shown by

at variance

tra-

his choice of a date for the

to disregard the oral traditions

and the written documents of

his

own

The atrium of his own house with its imagines maiorum and relative elogia must have been his principal archive. Several of the few extant fragments show that he used the traditions of his own family. This would be only natural both for the wars of the early Republic (before the battle of the Cremera when family and of allied aristocratic families.

his family faced ruin)

tions the Fabii

were

in

and

for the Samnite wars. In their family tradi-

no danger

century they were the

first

in the fourth century they

Etruscan language and

of being parochial. Just as in the third

to acquire

had

Greek language and

culture, so

sent their children to Caere to learn

literature.

The

had been "Caere educatus apud

great Fabius Rullianus

aided in his invasion of Etruria by a brother,

Fabius Victor and National History

103

hospites, Etruscis inde litteris eruditus,"

who knew

Etruscan well

(Liv.

The Etruscan hospites may well have told the Fabii somenot thing about the days in which Etruscan kings had ruled Rome IX, 36,

9).

—

necessarily the truth.

Yet the clearest proof of the influence of Greek models

devoted the greater part of his history to the origins of

is

that Fabius

Rome and

to

contemporary events. The origins and the wars with Pyrrhus and with Carthage were the sections of

Roman

history that

had

interested the

Greeks. Fabius must have thought that he could not afford to be fuse

on subjects which the Greeks had

too clever to idealise even his

own

left

dif-

unexplored. Indeed he was

ancestors. His version of the

famous

quarrel between the dictator L. Papirius and the magister equitum Fabius Rullianus in the year 325 B.C. latter.

He his

entirely favourable to the

stated, either whimsically or brutally, that Fabius Rullianus

burned the booty adorn

was not

in

order to prevent the dictator from using

own triumph

it

to

(Liv. VIII, 30, 3).

To sum up, Fabius made his own the methods and results of Greek historians and extended them to periods and aspects of Roman history which the Greeks had not studied much.

In doing so, he used a

Roman

chronological system and no doubt took advantage of the pontifical

Roman sources. He was not, however, able to collect for the periods of Roman history which had not been

Annals and other

many new

facts

treated previously by the Greeks. It

now

will

have been noticed

that, so far,

I

have not even alluded to the

fashionable theory that Fabius wrote in Greek in order to

propaganda on behalf of

Rome among

make

Greeks. There was certainly

plenty of scope for the presentation of the

Roman

case to the Greeks

during or after the Second Punic War. Philinus of Agrigentum had

probably already published his history of the First Punic

was favourable

to the Carthaginians.

War which

Hannibal had taken care to have

two Greek historians in his camp: Silenus of Calacte and Sosylus of Sparta. Another Greek historian, Chaereas, is mentioned by Polybius (III, 20, 5) in a context which seems to imply that he was favourable to Hannibal. Even if Silenus and Sosylus published their work after Fabius, he

must have known while he was writing that Hannibal had

Fabius Pictor and National History

I04

Greek historians

in his service.

There

Fabius was conscious of helping

is

no

beUeving that

difficulty in

Rome when

he undertook to write in

Greek.

But before you use history to make propaganda you must know

how

to write history.

The important

about Fabius

fact

is

wrote history for propaganda but that he wrote history thermore, where

we can

All

Philinus the

at

Fur-

all.

the evidence for Fabius' propaganda?

is

say for certain

is

that Polybius considered Fabius

most authoritative historians

Roman and from

from the

spectively

not that he

of the First Punic

War

and re-

the Carthaginian point of view:

he criticised both for being biased. There

is

a difference between bias

and propaganda. few cases

In the

in

which Fabius

is

quoted about contemporary

and

events, he looks, perhaps deceptively, objective

precise

225

list

of the allied forces that helped

Rome

serene.

gave a

to beat the Gauls in

such a catalogue was in the best tradition of Greek histo-

B.C.:

riography.

He

Rome and

Carthage were almost exhausted before the

also

He

developed the view that

assumed that there was

a conflict

in the First

Punic last

War both battle. He

between Hannibal and the other

Carthaginian leaders and that the former forced the hands of the at the time of the

Saguntum

affair.

latter

This was an interpretation which

was unable to share. It may well be wrong, but it shows that Fabius was in no hurry to present the Carthaginians to the Greek pubPolybius

lic

as collectively responsible for the beginning of the

War. The tiffs

man who

decided to check the national Chronicle of the Pon-

against the histories of the Greeks obviously

mind

that

is

Second Punic

incompatible with mere propaganda.

to think that Fabius

was

a vulgar propagandist,

son to think that he invented

stories

about the

had the freedom of If

we have no

we have even

Roman

reason

less rea-

past. Professor

A. Alfoldi worked hard to present Fabius as a shameless forger. far

from convincing. His suggestion that

Cloelia, Lucretia,

He

is

and other

women of Roman history must have been invented by Fabius because women had no place in genuine Roman tradition seems to me

heroic

without any foundation whatsoever and incidentally

is

partly

due to a

wrong inference from what I once wrote about the banquet songs. The best test of a historian's honesty is what he says about his own

Fabius Pictor and National History family.

Now

105

Fabius had good grounds for believing that his ancestors

— obviously a corporation connected with the Fabian family —were consid-

were Romulus' contemporaries. The Luperci Fabiani ligious

Roman

ered as ancient as the tradition

the

on the Fabii

is

that

re-

urbs. Yet the striking thing

it is

silent

about their

about our

activities, if any, in

monarchic period. This means, of course, that no authentic

lection

had been preserved

of the prerepublican Fabii, but

that Fabius Pictor did not try to

by inventions of

Rome

remedy the

own. Fabius

his

I,

also

means

deficiencies of the tradition

formed a

certainly

in the age of the kings (Liv.

it

recol-

lofty picture of

44, 2; Dion. Hal. IV, 15,

i).

He

reported an alleged census of Servius which counted eighty thousand

male

citizens Hable for militay service ("qui

arma

ferre possent").

also attributed thirty local tribes to the Servian city. This

with which

we may

fact that the Fabii

well find

do not

it

is

He

a picture

impossible to agree. But apart from the

figure in

it,

there are other reasons

why we

The reforms of Servius had already been described by Timaeus, who committed the enormous anachronism of ascribing the introduction of coinage to this king. Timaeus had no mean opinion of the importance of Rome under Servius. Elsewhere I have tried to show that in his interpretation of the numbers of the Servian census Fabius Pictor may have accepted a figshould not consider

it

a piece of Pictor's private fantasy.

ure already given by Timaeus, though disagreeing with {Terzo Contributo

II,

654).

If

its

explanation

Fabius indulged in a complacent picture

Rome, he was not alone in this. the anonymous Greek fragment which

of early In

Vaticanum, there

is

a strange speech by a

warns the Carthaginians not to

rely

on

.

known

Roman

their

Drachmann, Diodors Romische Annalen ticanum, Bonn, 1912). In the past the

is

.

.

as the

Ineditum

who

called Keson,

supremacy

at sea (A. B.

samt dem Ineditum Va-

Romans had been

able to adopt

the military techniques of the Etruscans and of the Samnites: in the

same way they would deal with the Carthaginians. H. von Arnim recognised in the name Keson the prenomen Kaeso typical of the Fabian family and conjectured that Fabius Pictor was the ultimate source of the story

name

{Hermes 27, 1892, 130). Though others have suggested the

of Posidonius as the source of the Ineditum Vaticanum,

think that von Arnim's conjecture

is

I

still

more probable. The speech by Ke-

io6

Fabius Pictor and Xatiofial History

son looks

an authentic piece of Fabius" philosophy of

like

history.

was propaganda, it was not propaganda based on Hes and the Greek manner it was put m the form of a speech.

If it

forgery. In

X Other Romans followed Fabius

m the Greek language. But soon

Roman

attempt to write

in his

Cato showed that

his-

to use the Latin language for a historiography of the

was possible Greek t\^pe. Fiis

Origines were Latin in language and Greek in

assume that un-

tory

der the influence of Cato into Latin.

somebody decided

What happened

at

tury B.C. historiography of the

current

m

is

I

to translate Fabius' annals

that during the second cen-

m Latin became

Greek type but written

Rome.

Fabius really started a torians to help positive

any rate

spirit.

it

him

new

era

when he summoned

Roman

to put order into the

the Greek his-

tradition. This

had

and negative consequences. The positive consequence of his

operation was that forever after the

Romans had

the resources of

Greek historiography at their disposal. Even the pontifical registrations wTre soon to ical

cease, being out of touch with the

judgement, the source criticism, the

historians,

stylistic

new

spirit.

The

devices of the

polit-

Roman

were permanently affected by the Greek models. Sallust

looked back to Thucydides, Livy exploited Polybius, Varro took advantage of the Greek antiquarians. The

Greek example ical,

to

Romans were compelled by

probe their history from various angles

—the

polit-

the biographical, the erudite.

The mam negative consequences of the Roman assimilation of Greek historiography were two. The first was that the Romans inherited the Greek inabilit}' to do real research on the intermediate period between origins and contemporary

events. Like the

Greeks the

historians remained essentially equipped either to collect

and

Roman criticise

mythical traditions or to obser\'e and report contemporary history.

They were hardly mythical past,

if

able to examine the historical as

by examination

we mean

sionaly study of primarv' evidence.

opposed

to the

a systematic (not an occa-

They could

collate

ports by preceding historians, but their study of

and

criticise re-

more remote history

Fabius Pictor and National History

never had the value and the cogency of their study of contemporary

Mediaeval and modern historians

events.

many

cases until the nineteenth century w^orked under the

methods of

tation, just because they inherited the

raphy. Machiavelli, Guicciardini, historians of their

own

Commynes, and

never reacted spontaneously to the

that

Roman

an eye to

meant

his predecessors

had

said. If

in

their followers are

historiography

The Romans always

It is difficult

to assess

followed the

what he had

with

to say than in

he attacked his predecessors,

because he had to justify himself. With the

who

historiog-

But each Greek historian of the Classical

his predecessors.

the Greeks

limi-

in the long run. After all every historian writes

and Hellenistic ages was more interested

what

Roman

Roman

past.

judged themselves with an eye to the Greeks. this

same

in

times.

The second negative consequence was

what

and

until the eighteenth

Roman

path

was

— or indeed with imperial times — one

Romans in

is

not so sure. They were self-consciously building up their

To Cicero and

it

own

history

in the light of

Greek

history.

Greeks were

really

capable of writing history. Quintilian implies no

blame when he observes that much Greek

[Inst. Or.

his

in Sallust

contemporaries only the

was

translated from the

IX, 3, 17). In starting the story of the Second Punic

War, Livy leaves us

in

no doubt that he remembered Thucydides and

the Peloponnesian War.

The Roman

historians were obsessed by the comparison with the

Greeks. Later, under

Roman

influence, the humanistic historians

were

obsessed by the comparison with their classical models. The historiog-

raphy of Western Europe was born with Fabius Pictor as an act of

and

eralisation

stances

rationalisation, but

which remained

until recent times.

It

under somewhat

characteristic of

would be

artificial

lib-

circum-

European historiography

interesting to discuss at

what date mod-

ern historians began to feel that comparison with the Latins and the

Greeks was no longer compulsory. Perhaps perhaps only

We tion

shall

in the eighteenth century,

in the nineteenth century.

not blame Fabius Pictor

if

in his struggle against supersti-

and traditionalism he had to turn to the Greeks

credit the

Roman

pontiffs. Classicism

is

in

order to dis-

never so dangerous as tradi-

tionalism. Moreover, the result of Fabius' efforts

was perhaps more

Fabius Pictor and National History

io8

original than he expected or intended.

gurated a

new

type of national history,

The annals he produced inauless

antiquarian than the local

more concerned with the continuity of political institutions than most of the Greek general histories we know. The Romans could not remain bound to the notion of contemporary history because they had a profound sense of tradition and continuity. They might be uncritical about their own past, but they felt chronicles of the Greek states,

they had to narrate their nings. istic

The annals from

own

history ab urbe condita, from the begin-

Rome

the origins of

were the most character-

product of their historiography. Livy was the greatest representa-

tive of this genre,

form

which was

still

accepted by Tacitus as the natural

of history writing. In these annals

spirit of the old pontifical registrations, the

something survived of the Annals of the

Pontiffs.

Rev-

olutionary in a hundred ways, Fabius had remained faithful to the old spirit of

Roman

past and making

Annals of the

pre-Greek annals by starting from the immemorial

memorial.

it

Roman

Pontiffs. Fabius Pictor

traditionalism

kept

it

alive

had inspired the

while accepting the

methods, and to a great extent the contents, of Greek political history. Fabius invented national history for the Latin West. Thereby he created the form for the expression of national consciousness: possibly he

contributed to the creation of national consciousness

understand

We knew

itself,

such as

we

it.

have only to turn to Cornelius Tacitus for confirmation. Tacitus that he

ages had seen

was

living in a

little.

He was

world of which the Greeks of previous

too intensely concerned with his

own

cen-

tury to write about previous centuries, but he never forgot them: he

assumed continuity tablish a line of his

allegiance to ers.

There

is

Roman history. He was original enough to esown in the history of historiography. Freed from

in

Greek models, he imposed

his individuality

a Tacitist school, in a sense in which

it

on

his read-

would be

difficult

to speak even of a Sallustian or Caesarian or Livian school of history.

CHAPTER

FIVE

Tacitus and the Tacitist Tradition

I

For about three centuries, from the Reformation to the French Revolution, Tacitus inspired or troubled politicians, moralists,

and even

theologians, not to speak of the subjects he provided for poetry and painting.

mans

He

operated in tw^o different camps.

to reassert their nationality

eign rule of the litical

Roman

He

he helped the Ger-

and consequently to attack the

for-

Church. Second, he disclosed the secrets of po-

behaviour both to those

governed.

First,

who

governed and to those

who were

taught the former more than one sleight-of-hand and

w^arned the latter that such tricks were cruel and inevitable: everyone

had

to

know

his place.

Aphorisms and

political discourses

on Tacitean

themes multiplied. There was of course also a great deal of imitation of Tacitus in historical prose. But only the in Tacitus

— and more

for their historical

German

antiquarians found

work. The events of

—

Germania a modern Europe

specifically in the

precise

model

at large could

not be satisfactorily narrated within a Tacitean framework. Tacitus

had never dealt with geographical Ugion, and trade competition.

discoveries, colonisation,

Though he had perceived

wars of

re-

the future im-

portance of Germans and Christians, he had been spared the fulfilment of his forebodings.

It is

therefore

more appropriate

to speak of "Taci-

tism" in relation to the political thought of the age of absolutism,

though few historians of that age remained insensitive to

The

original lecture

title

was "Tacitus and

his art of dis-

the Discovery of Imperial Tyranny."

109

IXO

Tacitus

covering substance under appearances. olution,

Gibbon gave

Whatever

history.

own

roots were in his

the Tacitist Tradition

the eve of the French Rev-

supreme example of Tacitean

the

to a different type of historiography.

modern

On

and

Even

so,

style

adapted

Gibbon's subject w^as not

Tacitus' lesson for the age of absolutism,

choice of subjects and in his

own

its

ambiguities.

Tacitism was not an arbitrary interpolation into Tacitus. To under-

we must

stand Tacitism,

first

consider Tacitus.

II

We

must

resist

any attempt at presenting Tacitus as a researcher on

original evidence in the sense in

tury

a researcher.

is

We know

which a historian of the twentieth cen-

that ancient historians normally did re-

search only in connection with contemporary events which they were the

first

to describe: Pliny the Younger, a friend of Tacitus, confirms

this. Tacitus,

diurna

no doubt, read with care the acta senatus and the acta

—the records of the Senate meetings and the

the period of Domitian, in which he broke

city journal

—

for

new ground. But we cannot

assume without very good reasons that he did the same thing systematically for the

period from Tiberius to Titus, for which he could use

The Histories offer the best opportunity for examining Tacitus' methods of work. We can compare Tacitus with Suetonius, Plutarch, and Dio on the events of the year a.d. 69. Tacitus' account is literary sources.

very similar to that of the other authorities, and clearly derives from a

common source. are not so close

In the

—a

Annals the

fact that

similarities

with the parallel sources

admits of more than one explanation. But

even in the Annals^ Tacitus claims in only one place to have gone back to the acta senatus (XV, 74), whereas he implies at least twice that he

did not trouble to consult them on controversial issues. In Annals 88, Tacitus states: "I find

from contemporary authors

bers of the Senate that a letter

was read

in the

II,

who were mem-

Curia from the Chattan

chief Adgandestrius promising the death of Arminius,

if

poison were

do the work." Here Tacitus says that he got his information from senatorial historians: he does not mention the acta senatus, though the letter from the German chieftain was read in the Senate. sent to

Mommsen

tried to avoid the inevitable inference

by suggesting that in

Tacitus

and

III

the Tacitist Tradition

a question of political

murder the acta senatus would remain

silent.

had been in the habit of checking the historians against the acta senatus^ he would have told us that the acta senatus did not confirm the story of the senatorial historians. In another passage, Annals I, 8i, Tacitus admits his inability to form a clear picture of the But

if

Tacitus

procedure of the consular elections of a.d. 15, though he had consulted the historians and Tiberius' speeches. Here again he excludes the acta

we must not

senatus by implication. Incidentally

take the reference to

Tiberius' speeches as a reference to the acta senatus: Tiberius' speeches

had been collected and could be read without going to the acta senatus. If a confirmation of these deductions was needed, it was provided by the discovery of the Tabula Hebana. The inscription contains some

about the elections which Tacitus had been un-

at least of the details

able to discover for himself.

As

not formally, a deliberation of the Senate, in the acta senatus. Tacitus'

only

if

Sir

Hebana

the Tabula

ignorance of

it

its

is

substantially,

if

must have been reported

contents can be explained

he did not consult the relevant protocols of the Senate meetings.

Ronald Syme

senatus to

make

is

prepared to believe that Tacitus used the acta

Emperor Claunot from an anti-

a special study of the speeches of the

would

dius. Tacitus' antiquarian excursuses

derive,

quarian handbook, as Friedrich Leo suggested, but from Claudius' antiquarian speeches in the Senate. This is

certainly

dius'

an element of truth

in

is

an amusing thought; and there

Tacitus read with great care Clau-

it.

speech about the admission of the Gauls to the Senate because he

remembered

in a different context for his excursus

it

[Ann. IV, 65).

We

in other pieces of

can

easily believe that

Claudian pedantry.

on Mons Caelius

he took a whimsical pleasure

He

devoted an excursus in An-

nals XI, 14 to the history of the alphabet, for instance:

we know

that

problems connected with the alphabet were a favourite subject with the

Emperor Claudius. But

there

is

nothing to suggest that Tacitus' ac-

quaintance with Claudius' speeches was wide. The further suggestion that Tacitus

acta senatus

knew is

Claudius' speeches from direct consultation of the

even

less

clear. Tacitus states that

pomerium, that

is,

probable.

will

Augustus preceded Claudius

the sacred

statement Sir Ronald

One example

Syme

boundary of

takes to

Rome

come from

make my

point

in enlarging the

{Ann. XII, 23). This

a speech by Claudius

112

Tacitus

and

the Tacitist Tradition

in the Senate on the proposed extension of the sacred boundary. Overwhelming evidence shows that Augustus never extended the pomer-

ium. Augustus himself never mentions such a performance in his Res

and the Lex de imperio Vespasiani does not

Gestae-,

cite

Augustus as

a predecessor of Claudius in extending the pomerium. Furthermore, the respectable antiquarian the

pomerium

in the

extension of the

De

who

is

behind Seneca in the discussion on

Brevitate vitae (XIII, 8) does not

pomerium by Augustus. De

when

silence

that Augustus did not in fact

is

the subject

did not, then Claudius ficial

speech.

He was

inventing facts.

We

is

was

of an

was pomerium by

Brevitate vitae itself

written within a few months of the extension of the

Claudius

know

The only explanation for this extend the pomerium. But if he

topical.

unlikely to have lied to the senators in an of-

too good an antiquarian to discredit himself by

do not know who

first

made

the mistake of attrib-

pomerium to Augustus, but we can was not Claudius. Somebody between Claudius and

uting the extension of the

at least

say that

Tacitus

it

must have thought

Rome

to the

atus, but

first

on a

fit

to attribute a

widening of the sacred border of

emperor. Tacitus here depends not on the acta sen-

literary tradition later accepted

by Dio Cassius and also

by the Historia Augusta. The extent of Tacitus' original research

bound to be a matter of doubt and controversy because only do we

cases

have enough evidence to assess

it.

For instance,

in

is

a few

we cannot

say where Tacitus found his information about the debate between

Helvidius Priscus and Eprius Marcellus which

uously in the Histories, senatus, but

Book

more probably

IV.

now

figures so conspic-

He may have read about it in

in the

the acta

biography of Helvidius Priscus

which had been written by Herennius Senecio. Indeed Tacitus may simply have based his account on another historian who had already used the biography of Helvidius written by Herennius Senecio.

we can

say

is

What

that our present evidence offers nothing to support the

anachronistic image of a Tacitus passing his mornings in the archives of the If

Senate.

was not a researcher in the modern sense, he was, howwriter whose reliability cannot be seriously questioned. When

Tacitus

ever, a

we

Roman

question Tacitus' account of Tiberius or doubt his information

about the Parthian campaigns of Nero, we are

really discussing details.

Tacitus

To put

means

and it

113

the Tacitist Tradition

more

that

sharply,

if

you do not believe Livy on Romulus,

you cannot know

anything about Romulus, but

not believe Tacitus on Tiberius,

this

means only

that

if

this

you do

you have to think

again about certain details of Tiberius' reign. Suetonius, Dio, Plutarch

main

—not to facts

speak of the inscriptions

— support Tacitus

and reduce the controversy about

in all his

his truthfulness to

margins. While the discovery of the Tabula

narrow

Hebana has shown

that

Tacitus overlooked certain aspects of the consular elections under Tiberius,

we must not

forget that Tacitus

get sufficient information about them.

had admitted I

which Tacitus may be suspected with some

know

his inability to

of only

justification of

one case

having con-

sciously altered the truth for the sake of rhetorical effect.

Cremutius Cordus IV, 34). Yet

recite a

we know from

suicide before he

was

in

speech in the Senate during his

He makes trial

{Ann.

Seneca that Cremutius Cordus committed

tried in the Senate (Cons.

Marc. XXII,

6). It is

hard to avoid the conclusion that Tacitus made Cremutius go before the Senate because he

had thought of a good speech

mouth. But

add that

it is

fair to

this idea

may

a predecessor of Tacitus. In that case Tacitus in trusting a predecessor instead of

to put into his

already have occurred to

would have been

at fault

going to read the acta senatus for

himself.

method of his own, The claims he makes for himself to

Tacitus never claimed to be a historian with a as

Thucydides or Polybius

did.

—

write sine ira et studio and to disdain trivial details

conventions of Graeco-Roman historiography. of

Roman

lust,

He

—belong to the

accepts the pattern

makes it plain that he studied his SalHe does not want to appear as an innovator.

annalistic writing; he

Caesar, and Livy.

Neither the subjects he chooses nor the materials he uses were

new

or

particularly difficult to handle.

Yet in another sense Tacitus rians of Antiquity.

is

one of the most experimental histo-

Only Xenophon, among the historians who have

come down to us, can be compared with him in this respect. Xenophon tried biography, historical novel, military history with an autobiographical element, mere historical narrative, and finally a collection of philosophical sayings. Superficially Tacitus

is

not so many-sided.

He

tried only biography, ethnography, historical discussion of the decline

114

Tacitus

of eloquence,

and

and

the Tacitist Tradition

finally plain annalistic narrative.

But almost

all

his

experiments are complex. Each big experiment includes other experiments. The Agricola

is

biography with an ethnographic-historical

background: the combination cannot have been common. The Ger-

mania

ethnography with a

is

take the dialogue cussion.

It

De

political message.

I

may

be permitted to

Oratoribus as Tacitus' work without further

dis-

combines an attempt to describe the subjective reactions of

various persons to the political regime under which they

live

with an

attempt to clarify the causes of the decline of eloquence. Even in his

most mature

historical writing Tacitus experimented.

the Histories

is

a picture of a civil

war

in

which the leaders

and perhaps

less

Roman mob.

In the Annals the perspective

ities

important than the crowds

of the emperors

and of

their

losophers, dominate the scene.

cause Tacitus makes possible.

We may

it

women,

We

What we have

is

—

are

of

no more

soldiers, provincials,

changed. The personal-

of a

few generals and phi-

take the change to be natural be-

appear natural, but other solutions were

suspect that the complexities of that dark emperor-

maker Antonius Primus, as described in the Histories^ would have been more interesting to Tacitus ten years later when he wrote the Annals-,

while the open-air scenes of the

would have been

fire

of

Rome

as told in the

better described ten years earlier,

Annals

when he wrote

the

Histories

Some

The lesser works after all are lesser works just because they do no more than hint at the most serious historical problems. The Agricola might have developed into a study of the impact of Romanisation on the natives of Britain. The Germania is potentially an enquiry into the relations between the free Germans and the Roman Empire; the Dialogus outlines research on the interrelations between political liberty and intellectual of the experiments were never developed in

activities.

None

of these themes

is

full.

taken up in earnest and turned into

would have become a very different type of historian if he had done so. He would have become a critic of the structure of the Roman Empire. He would have told us explicitly whether or not he believed that there was a reasonable alternative to the present regime of Rome. The very fact that Tacitus wrote the Agricola and the Germania in a.d. 98, before the Histories and the Annals, shows that a full-scale history. Tacitus

Tacitus

and

115

the Tacitist Tradition

at the beginning of his career as a historian he

Roman

damental questions about not pursue these themes cline of

wanted

to ask

some

fun-

provincial government. But he did

nor did he develop the theme of the de-

fully;

eloquence outside the Dialogus. Any development of

this

kind

w^ould have implied a complete break with the political and historiographical tradition of

Rome.

up the society of the senatorial the

first

member

class for

of his family to qualify. Historiographically he

have had to repudiate the traditions of fined as

it

was

would have had to give which he had probably been

Politically Tacitus

to political

and

Roman

would

annalistic writing, con-

religious events in the

narrow

sense.

We

can only speculate on the form Tacitus' historical work would have taken had he chosen to describe the slow transformations of tual

in

life

Rome and

of tribal

life in

intellec-

the provinces.

Breaks of such far-reaching proportions were not unheard of in the

world

which Tacitus

in

and Cynics were prepared to

lived. Christians

them the forms and substance of Roman political life. The Christians had even invented new historiographical forms the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles to express their new outlook. But Tacitus was neither a Christian nor a Cynic; and to be fair to him, neither the Christians nor the Cynics came near to asking the sort of quesleave behind

—

—

tions

we

see

Germania and

implied in the

in

De

dialogue

the

Oratoribus. In short Tacitus did not pursue his

most daring experiments, but de-

voted his major historical works to a subject which was tionary without being conventional.

way on

the

most undesirable

He began to work

in

less revolu-

an analytical

features of tyrannical government.

The

war under tyrants, with its interconnected features of mob irresponsibility and upperclass greed for power. The Annals defy simple definition. Each emperor is analysed at his worst, his collaborators share his fate, and only surviving part of the Histories

a few individuals

is

largely

about

civil

— mainly senators with a philosophical

faith

— escape

condemnation because they face martyrdom.

A sober evaluation of the originality terprise

is

of such a historiographical en-

almost impossible. The evidence

Tacitus' predecessors are

Hellenistic historians

all lost.

who

He may

is

missing.

The works

of

have learned something from

wrote chronicles of tyrants. The Athenian

Tacitus

who

Demochares,

and

the Tacitist Tradition

in the first part of the third century B.C.

sionately hostile account of the

gave a pas-

government of Demetrius Poliorcetes

in

Athens, certainly qualified as a model for antityrannical historians. But

tyranny in Greece v^as something provisional, something violently and

on a democratic

uneasily superimposed likely that

any Greek historian could

who was

rian like Tacitus,

his

seems highly un-

be of great use to a histo-

describing the consequences of the perma-

was bound

to learn

immediate predecessors,

who were

also

sources. Yet

we must make

borrowing interpretations. originality of Tacitus as

dence.

It

liberty. Tacitus

nent suppression of

from

structure.

really

The comparison

immediate

his

borrowing

a distinction between I

much more and

facts

should be very embarrassed to assess the

an interpreter of history on the present

conclusive about the existence of a

common

evi-

and Suetonius

is

source for the facts, but

is

of Tacitus with Dio, Plutarch,

common

quite inconclusive about the existence of a

source for the

interpretation of the facts. Yet where the comparison

easier, in

is

the Histories, the differences of interpretation between Tacitus and

the other surviving historians are conspicuous. Only Tacitus interprets

Roman army

the crisis of 69 as the collapse of the discipline of the

made

possible by the demoralisation of the

ther Plutarch nor ciety.

When we

Dio

Roman

aristocracy. Nei-

interprets the events of 69 as the crisis of a so-

read Tacitus,

we immediately

feel

that he gives us

something different from the other historians. His analysis of human behaviour

is

deeper, his attention to the social traditions, to the precise

circumstances,

far

more vigorous. He conveys

and accurate choice

a subtle tirely

is

of details

which are expressed

real predecessors

a Tacitean style before Tacitus. This

cause ultimately our purpose

became

is

to

is

is

enough

show how

by

an en-

in

personal language. The picture which sticks in our mind

own. To admit that Tacitus had

was

his interpretation

is

his

to admit that there

for our purpose, be-

his picture of

despotism

classic.

Tacitus' theoretical

Rome, on opments

remarks on the beginning of the decline of

the relative merits of fate and providence, and

of political institutions are notoriously vague

contradictory.

victory of

its

He

consistently cared for the

on the

devel-

and even

honour of Rome,

armies, for the extension of the borders of the

self-

for the

Roman

I

Tacitus

even

State,

man

and

case.

117

the Tacitist Tradition

when he was clearly not certain about the merits of the RoOne of his accusations against Tiberius is that he was not

interested in extending the

Roman Empire

{Ann. IV, 32). His accounts

wars are founded upon the presupposition that once a war was

of

Rome was automatically desirable. He took for granted the right of the Roman state to conquer and win though he questioned the consequences. He liked fairness towards the provinstarted the victory of

but never doubted the right to repress any rebellion of the pro-

cials,

vincials.

man

—

He

extended his prejudice to include a great number of Ro-

upper-class likes and dislikes. Greeks, Jews, and Christians are

looked

down

on, and there

is

the conventional contempt for liberti

and

more in general for mere plebeians. This means that the area in which he was prepared effectively to question the Roman imperial structure was limited. He had no ideas of his own about foreign policy, and in the matter of provincial policy he shared the widely the Latin of the

West was more promising than the Greek

first

felt

East.

opinion that

The emperors

century a.d. very nearly practised what Tacitus preached

about the rights of Rome, the policy of conquest, the dangers of aliens

and mobs.

On

was marginal. His

these points Tacitus' disagreement

notoriously ambiguous account of the persecution of the Christians

under Nero, though

critical of the

Emperor, does not question

his ul-

timate right to persecute. Tacitus' real

aim

v^as to

unmask

the imperial rule, in so far as

government by debasement, hypocrisy, and

He

cruelty.

it

was

did not exclude

any class from the consequences of such a regime, but concentrated on the imperial court itself

allowed.

They were

and on the senators. Individual exceptions he

either the martyrs, like

Thrasea Paetus, or the wise

men,

like Agricola,

ment

that in the Annals the martyrs figure

but

it is

more mature judgemuch more prominently

characteristic of his

than the wise men. To see the prostitution of the to have to recognise that there British chieftain than in a

of tyranny.

The whole

the shameful times. ate

was

Roman

often

more

dignity in a

—that was the

senator

history of the years

weakness of the

Roman

Roman

68—70

is

aristocracy,

German

or

last bitterness

the consequence of

Senate in changing masters

Nothing said against Tiberius equals the indictment of

five

his Sen-

"pavor internus occupaverat animos, cui remedium adulatione

ii8

Tacitus

quaerebatur"

74). Adulatio

(IV,

is

and

the Tacitist Tradition

the recurring word. Domitian's

mind was corrupted by adulation: adulation is promised by Galba to Piso, On the other hand protests against the tyrant, if ever uttered, are not invariably praiseworthy: they run the risk of being useless and olous, inane.

One

of the aspects of tyranny

is

to

impose a

choice between adulation and empty protest or, to put

words, "inter abruptam contumaciam

friv-

difficult

in Tacitean

it

deforme obsequium" {Ann.

et

IV, 20).

Such a priate,

is

which even the

situation, in

free

the indication that something

is

nature. Tyranny ceases to be an isolated

symptom lation

of a basic

— or

to

make

Men

evil.

word

only seldom appro-

is

wrong with human phenomenon and becomes a radically

are ready to forsake freedom for adu-

empty words

fools of themselves by

of freedom.

The more Tacitus pursues this point, from the Histories to the Annals, the more pessimistic he becomes. The deeper he looks, the more evident the contrast becomes between reality and appearances, between

deeds and words in

no

nihilist.

human

His pessimism

clined to admit.

us.

Perhaps there

man

is

Empire

greater upheavals

an insoluble is

much

it

to be in dan-

less

querulous

He

not distrusted by Tacitus.

conflict in Tacitus'

comes

it.

only

much, indeed, that

whole. But he dislikes intensely

it

as unmodifiable.

as unmodifiable, he cannot really see

when he began

approach to the Ro-

Just because he cannot criticise the

to accept

have an Empire without tyranny. rection

is

and were

that he approves of, so

which goes with

as a whole, he

he accepts

bad end, and he

on the whole do not seem

criticise the institution as a

the despotism

are in-

power.

Empire. There

he cannot

us has a

we

is

man cannot avoid going wrong. But there What remains untold is safe enough. Fam-

about them. Even power as such dislikes tyrannical

tells

Tacitus

does not worry about them. Thucydides and Po-

much

lybius registered

insist,

that

property, rank, education

ger. Certainly Tacitus

we must

perhaps more superficial than

is

Almost every story he

may give the impression is much he does not tell ily,

behaviour. Yet,

He may

how

And

it is

possible to

have had hopes in that

to write the Histories., but those hopes

evil in

di-

had van-

was led to admit an the Roman Empire. The psychology of

ished long before he started the Annals. Thus he

unchangeable element of

because

Tacitus

and

119

the Tacitist Tradition

the tyrant turned out to be only a prominent manifestation of the per-

manent greed, lust, and vanity of man as such. Paradoxically it is his conservatism which forces Tacitus to be a pessimist. He is a pessimist because he cannot even conceive of an alternative to the

Roman

Empire. It is

part of the insoluble conflict in Tacitus'

gets that liberty.

human

Where

nature

much

so

is

mind

that he never for-

capable of true courage, true frankness, true

adulation and hypocrisy prevail, he can give

examples of freedom of speech. Furthermore, he envisages distant worlds where virtue could reign unimpaired: primitive Rome, or per-

haps untouched barbarian lands. Admittedly these limited practical importance. Tacitus

Roman irony,

republic in the old sense

by

now

it

clear that

any idea of a

obsolete and, with tragic

emphasises the danger that freedom-loving barbarians represent

for the

Roman

aged to keep itus.

is

makes

fairy lands are of

He

State.

But the individuals

alive the old

who

at their

own

peril

man-

freedom are of immense importance to Tac-

among them. He never judges from morally superior position. One of his very rare per-

does not include himself

the security of a

sonal notes

is

to confess that he

had accepted Domitian's tyranny with-

out offering resistance.

had no intention of competing with the philosophers. He would have been very annoyed to be taken for one. Towards the greatTacitus

est

philosopher of the previous generation, Seneca, he maintained a

guarded attitude. Modern scholars have been given plenty of scope to discuss whether Tacitus liked Seneca. His very admission of relative

cowardice in the time of Domitian also serves the purpose of preventing any confusion between himself and the philosophers.

from the middle of the tion

from

its evils.

Roman

State

He

speaks

and does not claim any exemp-

Yet both the methods and the results of his histori-

cal writing recall the

contemporary philosophers.

history the subtlety of analysis

He

transferred to

which philosophers had developed

through the centuries of Hellenistic and the opinion of those philosophers

who

rare achievement of individual effort,

Roman

rule.

He

confirmed

thought that "virtus" was the

more

often to be obtained by

standing up against the government of the day than by governing others.

I20

Tacitus

and

the Tacitist Tradition

III Tacitus' teaching

meant

about despotism was ambivalent.

was never

It

to encourage revolutions, but would obviously open the eyes of

who

anyone

cared to see the effects of despotism. Other people, how-

ever, could take

it

as

an object lesson

in the art of

government, a lesson

of realism. In Antiquity

A

message.

few people were prepared to ponder such a complex

Tacitus could mature only in solitude. Even his contem-

porary Pliny the Younger, with

all

his

admiration for Tacitus, was un-

able to grasp his friend's thought. Later Tacitus seems to have found a

public

among

the last

Romans

mianus Marcellinus sharpened

of the fourth his wits

gia rather than ruthless objectivity

Ammianus

on

and

centuries

because

centuries.

Tacitus' pages.

was the keynote

Am-

But nostal-

of the age: while

recaptured some of the spaciousness, nobility, and bitter-

ness of the Histories, he no longer questioned

agonising

fifth

human

nature in the

way which is characteristic of Tacitus. Like El Greco many later, Ammianus came to be interested in the world (visually) appeared ill-proportioned and quaint. Other aristocrats

it

with learned

tastes, especially in

Gaul, enjoyed their Tacitus without

further probing into his teaching. There

was

a friend of Sidonius Apol-

who

even claimed descent from Tacitus {Ep. IV, 14); Sulpicius Severus and Orosius used him extensively. People went on quoting him linaris

in the sixth century.

But he must by then have been a very dim figure

who

used his Germania, could refer to him as a "cer-

if

Cassiodorus,

tain Cornelius," "Cornelio

quodam"

During the Middle Ages, only

them were

2).

few read Tacitus, and almost

in Benedictine monasteries either in

Fulda) or connected with

Germany

important manuscript of the tories (the

a

{Variae V,

ently stolen

(such as Montecassino).

later part of the

Mediceus secundus

Germany

all

of

(such as

Our most

Annals and of the His-

was apparfourteenth century. The story

in the Laurentian Library)

from Montecassino

in the

was the thief has unfortunately proved to be unreliable. The Minor Works were brought from Germany to Italy in the fifteenth century: here again the details are notoriously uncertain, but the Mithat Boccaccio

nor Works were

in

Rome

by about 1455. For the

rest of the

century

Tacitus

there

and

121

the Tacitist Tradition

was no

further increase in the

knowledge of

Tacitus' text; but

what people had was enough to make minds work. Florence was the first intellectual and political centre to react to Tacitus' message, just as it was the first to appreciate Polybius. Characteristically Leonardo Bruni used Polybius to supplement Livy for the story of

Roman wars

and extracted from Tacitus the notion that great

vanish

power

all

is

pubHca

res

in unius

modern

(of

about 1403)

potestatem deducta

quit Cornelius) abiere"

Tacitus in

when

concentrated in one man. Bruni's quotation of Tacitus in

Laudatio Florentinae Urbis

his

intellects

—

is

the

first

est,

—"Nam posteaquam

preclara

ilia

ingenia (ut in-

evidence for the appearance of

political thought.

About

thirty years later

Poggio

Bracciohni turned to Tacitus again to support, against Guarino Guarini,

the superiority of republican Scipio over monarchic Caesar. This,

however, was a use of Tacitus which derived special position of Florence in

and

Visconti,

lost

its

its

significance

struggle against

from the

Milan ruled by the

importance with the general decline of republican

ideals in Florence itself

and

entine interpretation of

what was known

in the rest of Italy.

Furthermore, the Flor-

of Tacitus did not provide a

clue to the understanding of the only conspicuous exception in this decline

—the republic of Venice.

As

far as

I

know

(but

I

am

of the Quattrocento), Tacitus

good

sixty years.

not a specialist in the political literature

was put

These are the years

in

aside in Italy about

1440 for a which the Germans were learn-

ing to read the Germania. Enea Silvio Piccolomini

first

brought

it

to

Germans in 1458. By 1500 it had become a mirror in which the Germans liked to look at themselves. Conrad Celtis was apparently the first to lecture on Tacitus in a German university, in about 1492. He started the tradition of investigation into German an-

the attention of the

which

tiquities

his pupil

Johannes Aventinus, together with Beatus

Rhenanus, Sebastian Miinster, and many others, was to continue. The learned enquiry both implied and fostered a claim of independence and

perhaps of superiority in relation to the imperial the papal pitality

Rome of the present.

he had received in

Tacitus

Rome

was beginning

of the past

and

to repay the hos-

German monasteries during

the

Middle

Ages.

At

this

point the manuscript of Books I— VI of the Annals^ according

122

Tacitus

was

to contemporary evidence,

Rome story.

and

the Tacitist Tradition

from Corvey and brought to about 1509. There seems to be no serious reason to doubt this Phihppus Beroaldus pubUshed the editio princeps of the first stolen

was returning at the right time. MachiavelU had written // Principe two years before. He was working at the same time on those Discorsi sulla Prima Deca which destroyed any illusion the Florentines might ever have had about the similarity of their government with that of republican Rome. Tiberius was accompanied by another no less timely ghost, that of Arminius "liberator baud dubie Germaniae." Almost on the heels of Beroaldus' edition Ulrich von Hutten wrote the Arminius dialogus (c. books of the Annals

1520), a

in 15 15. Tiberius' ghost

momentous event

in the history of

called in as witness by

Arminius and

citus

is

illud

meum quod in historiis tuis est."

German

is

nationalism. Ta-

asked to recite "elogium

In the Ragguagli del Parnaso by

Traiano Boccalini the reactionary god Apollo puts together Luther and

two worst

the manuscript of Tacitus as the

things

which had ever come

out of Germany. Tacitus found himself at the confluence of the two great

movements

of the sixteenth century, religious reform

and mo-

narchic absolutism. In the later Discorsi^ Machiavelli himself quoted little

of Tacitus

and almost nothing of the newly discovered section on

showed something of more obvious sympathy for Tacitus. They

Tiberius. His few quotations, however,

general importance than his

showed

that Tacitus' books

even republican

Rome

—

for

made all

into sources of political strength

sense only

if

used to explain

why

her ability to turn political struggles

—

fell

under the control of monarchs.

—

was the complement to Livy the historian who more than Tacitus had been the guide of earlier humanistic historians. Guicciardini with his talent for the right word produced the formula for the new movement of ideas: "Tacitus teaches the tyrants how to be tyrants and their subjects how to behave under tyrants." The ambivalence of Tacitus

Tacitus

is

here recognised

alence that explains

why

—perhaps

for the first time.

It

III

this

ambiv-

he might alternatively serve the purposes of

the friends and of the enemies of absolutism.

Pope Paul

It is

Farnese were

among

the

most

Cosimo

I

Medici and

diligent readers of Tacitus.

has even been suggested that the Medici and the Farnese as family

groups became special devotees of Tacitus.

Tacitus

and

123

the Tacitist Tradition

There were resistances to be overcome before Tacitus could be accepted as a major teacher of pohtical wisdom. The truest classicists

The pious remembered that Tacitus had been attacked by Tertullian (Ad Nat. I, 11) for his pages on the Christians. Bude could not forgive Tacitus on grounds of religion: "Hominem ne." The circumstance that another dubious characfarium Tacitum. ter, Jean Bodin, took up the case of Tacitus against Bude was perhaps not a recommendation. Only when the split between Catholic and Protand theological disputes lost estant Europe became an accepted fact stuck to Cicero and Livy.

.

.

—

something of

their

urgency

— did Tacitus gain

put the turning point around 1580, to give lectures

on

Tacitus'

Annals

critic of political

everyone. soul.

He

helped the

at the University of

started

—the very

the exegete

search into the obscurities of the all

Modern Dutch

to Ufe by the contact of

Dutch

human

the later French

La Rochefoucauld owed something

especially in the study of hypocrisy.

Two

Rome

was both

Montaigne studied and admired him, and

most brought

We may

absolutism: the ambiguity pleased almost

new

moralists from Charron to

authority.

when Marc-Antoine Muret

centre of the Counter-Reformation. Tacitus

and the

full

literature

intellectuals

to him,

was

al-

with Tacitus.

other factors contributed. The condemnation of Machiavelli's

works by the Catholic Church (1559) had Tacitus could easily

left

an empty space which

What could not be said in the name of Catholic said in the name of pagan Tacitus. If somebody

fill.

Machiavelli could be

was not supposed to know the whole truth. Second, Ciceronianism was undergoing a crisis. The popularity of Seneca both as a stylist and as a philosopher was mounting; Neo-Stoicism became the faith of those who had lost patience with theology, if they had not lost faith altogether. The fortunes of Seneca and Tacitus became indissolubly connected towards objected to Tacitus, one could always reply that a pagan

the

end of the sixteenth century.

In the controversy

and the French about the superiority of

became Tacitus was

between the

Italians

their respective languages, the

As

ability to translate Tacitus

a test case.

vanzati's translation of

the answer to

is

well

known, Da-

some derogatory

re-

marks by Henricus Stephanus. Davanzati tried to prove that one could write as concisely in Italian as Tacitus had done in Latin. Davanzati

was

successful in writing short sentences, but Italian remained a Ian-

Tacitus

12,4

guage of interminable sentences. One thesis of

man

Seneca and Tacitus: Muret's

mind was more with Seneca,

and

the Tacitist Tradition

represented the

new

syn-

disciple, Justus Lipsius. If his

his heart, his personal experience,

were

much, interpreted him so case so authoritatively, and combined his teach-

for Tacitus. Justus Lipsius loved Tacitus so learnedly, pressed his

was impossible not to liswho was born a Catholic and

ing with that of Seneca so ingeniously that ten to him. Because Justus Lipsius,

ended a Catholic, spent part of he made propaganda

it

his learned life in the Protestant

for Tacitus

on both

camp,

His con-

sides of the fence.

temporaries regarded Lipsius as the real discoverer of Tacitus, and they

were substantially

right.

But

I

was able

to

show many

years ago {Con-

tributor pp. 37—59) that another current of thought contributed to the

same

result.

in Paris

The study

by an

of Tacitus as a political thinker

Italian emigre,

who

like Lipsius

was introduced

wavered between Prot-

estantism and Catholicism, Carolus Paschalius, or Carlo Pasquale.

Both Paschalius and Lipsius published 15

81.

But whereas Lipsius was

torical allusions in Tacitus

a

commentary on Tacitus

in

chiefly interested in illustrating the his-

and

in interpreting his

words, Paschalius

treated Tacitus as a collection of political exampla. Lipsius availed

himself of Tacitus as a political thinker only in 1589,

when he pub-

lished his Politicorum libri V/, but not even then did he use Tacitus so extensively, indeed exclusively, as Paschalius

tary of

15

81.

Though

all

had done

in his

commen-

the later Tacitisti, as they were called, were

encouraged by the authority of Justus Lipsius, they depended more rectly

on Carolus Paschalius

for the type of their enquiry

and

form of presentation. The rapid progress of Tacitus' reputation litical

thinker in those years can be

logical sequence. itus as

The

an important

Jesuit

this significant

for the as a po-

chrono-

know of Tacwrote his De Regia

Giovanni Botero did not yet

political thinker

Sapientia in 1582. In 1589, ter a stay in Paris, he

shown by

di-

when he

when he published

his

Ragion

di Stato, af-

put together Machiavelli and Tacitus as the lead-

ing writers on politics.

The commentaries and

dissertations

on Tacitus of the next hundred

years are innumerable; Machiavellian Italy led the Tacitist movement,

and Spain, France, and Germany followed this order.

—

I

England contributed comparatively

venture to believe little,

—

in

and Holland too

Tacitus

and

125

the Tacitist Tradition

was not conspicuous in this type of production. England and Holland were the countries which were to give Europe her modern political thought with Hobbes, Grotius, Spinoza, and Locke. The defeat of the Armada saved England, among other things, from being invaded by Ben Jonson got into trouble for his Sejanus in 1603, some connection with the mounting wave of the Tacitism of those years must be admitted. Ben Jonson himself had greeted

Tacitus, or by the Tacitisti.

Sir

Henry

But

Savile's translation

if

and supplementation of the Histories

in

59 1 by an epigram (no. 95) which is an interesting characterisation of Tacitus from the Tacitist point of view: 1

We

need a man, can speake of the

The

councells, actions, orders

intents,

and events

Of state, and censure them: we need his pen Can write the things, the causes, and the men.

Books of foreign gilio

tions.

Tacitists

were translated into English— Boccalini, Vir-

Malvezzi. Others were read in the original or in Latin transla-

What

is

perhaps true

is

was a tendency to Bacon took him for an

that in England there

emphasise the antityrannical aspects of Tacitus.

enemy of absolute monarchy. The Dutch Dr. Isaac Dorislaus, who became the first holder of a lectureship in History at Cambridge in 1627, had soon

to leave his chair because he interpreted Tacitus in an ob-

viously antimonarchical spirit. Ultimately, however, in England the

most serious thinkers worried about the divine

rights of kings, not

about the psychology of tyranny. As the dispute between Salmasius

and Milton shows

in

an exemplary way,

more than Tacitus. The Tacitist literature groups:

(i)

(2)

counted for

of the Continent can be divided into four

Excerpts from Tacitus in the form of political aphorisms.

For instance, a prince

biblical texts

Abraham

must do

in

Golnitz in his Princeps of 1636 describes what

peace and war by means of excerpts from Tacitus.

Excerpts from Tacitus accompanied by a detailed political com-

mentary: Virgilio Malvezzi's Discorsi are a good sample. They belong

what Bacon would have called "historiae ruminatae." (3) General theories on politics vaguely founded on Tacitus, such as the Quaestiones ac Discursus in duos primos libros Annalium by Petrus Andreas

to

126

Tacitus

and

the Tacitist Tradition

Canonherius (Canoniero). (4) Political commentaries on Tacitus, which wavered somewhat ambiguously between an analysis of Tacitus' opinions and an analysis of the facts related by Tacitus. The commentaries

by Annibale Scoto and by Traiano Boccalini are of

Tacitus

became fashionable. He was even put

this type.

into Italian verse by

Alessandro Adimari, La Polinnia, ovvero cinquanta sonetti

.

.

.

fon-

dati sopra sentenze di G. Cornelio Tacito, 1628. Like every other fash-

became tiresome after a time and found itself in conflict with more modern trends. As I have already implied, doubts on Tacitus had always been maintained in certain Catholic circles. The ion "Tacitismo"

Spanish Jesuit Pedro Ribadeneira put together in one bunch Tiberius, "a very vicious and abominable emperor," Tacitus, "a pagan historian

and enemy of and Bodin, piety."

Christianity," Machiavelli, "the impious counsellor,"

who "was

The other

neither learned in theology nor accustomed to

Jesuit authority

complained that too many of one

syllable of the

1 61 7

Gospel

Famiano Strada,

is

better

his

on Machiavelli, Antonio Possevino,

contemporaries seemed to forget that

preferable to the whole of Tacitus.

known

And

to the English for his influence

in

on

Richard Crashaw's poetry, published a determined attack on Tacitus.

He renewed

the accusation of atheism and also tried to revive, against

Tacitus, the declining cult for Livy.

for his anti-Jewish

The

fact that

Spinoza liked Tacitus

and anti-Christian bias did not improve the pagan

author's popularity in pious circles.

About a century later dislike for Tacitus was expressed both on the right and on the left, by Catholics and by rationalists. While he was too much of a pagan for the Catholics, the libertines and rationalists disliked him for being too cynical and anyway too clearly connected with the Counter-Reformation. The decline of Spanish supremacy in Europe, the ascendancy of England and the Netherlands, the rise of

Cartesian rationalism and of Jansenism in France, were destroying the presuppositions upon which Tacitus had gained his authority. For once

Fenelon and Bayle found themselves in agreement on the point that Tacitus defeated his d'esprit,

il

own

purposes by too

much

subtlety: "il a trop

rapine trop." Saint-Evremond complained that Tacitus

turned everything into

who, according

politics: Voltaire himself

had no use

for Tacitus,

to the Traite sur la Tolerance, preferred slander to

Tacitus

and

the Tacitist Tradition

12.7

Madame du

truth. In a letter to

Deffand (no. 14202), Voltaire ex-

plained that Tacitus did not comply with the tory of Civilisation: "I (Voltaire) should like

number

Senate, the forces of the empire, the

of government, the customs, the habits.

m amuse,

sort in Tacitus. // in the

new

I

of the citizens, the

do not

form

find anything of the

People interested

et Tite-Live m'instruit.''

idea of parliamentary government spreading from England

found Tacitus

less instructive

than the historians of the

such as Polybius and Livy.

lic,

new standards of a Histo know the rights of the

On

the other

hand

Roman Repub-

the supporters of

Continental enlightened despotism discovered that Tacitus was an em-

barrassment to their cause: his emperors were only too clearly unenlightened despots.

This might well have been the end of the Tacitist period in modern political

thought

if

had not found new

Tacitus

allies in

To begin with, Giambattista Vico recognised

cles.

in Tacitus

four guides to the discovery of the laws of history. in Tacitus as the student of primitive, violent

scientiarum, 7, is,

2),

and Machiavelli,

was done quences-

as

it

man

his

interested

Bacon {De augmentis

as he should be.

man

as he

Vico revalued Ta-

were, from a higher point of view.

—independently and more

one of

cir-

— a complement

Vico regarded Tacitus as the portrayer of

while Plato contemplates

citus

He was

impulses

to Plato. Following a suggestion by Francis

unexpected

The same

crudely, but with greater conse-

— by the French Encyclopaedists.

Machiavelli was rescued by

the French Encyclopaedists partly because his

works had been put on

the Index, partly because they adopted the old extreme Baconian inter-

pretation that he the

new formula

chiavelli velli

was

is

the

was even

secretly hitting at despotism.

in the

book

Contrat Social

in the

Revolution. first

We

facts" {Decline

some

Tacitus.

They turned Tacitus

of obscurantist princes. This

is

the Tacitus,

prevailed in Europe immediately before the French

recognise

of historians

Ma-

Encyclopedie, also published an anthology of

enemy

into an enlightened

who

of

What was good for MachiaD'Alembert, who wrote the article on

Tacitus. Rousseau, too, translated

wise and mild,

"The Prince

of the Republicans."

better for Tacitus.

Machiavellianism

(ch. VI):

Rousseau produced

who

and

him

in

Gibbon's definition of Tacitus as "the

applied the science of philosophy to the study of

Fall, ed.

Bury, ch. IX, p. 230).

Gibbon learned

128

Tacitus

more than one

stylistic trick

from

and

the Tacitist Tradition

With due acknowledgement treated him in a similar way in

Tacitus.

to d'Alembert and Gibbon, John

Hill

a really important paper published in the Transactions of the Royal

Academy

of Edinburgh in 1788. But in England the interpretation in-

had been somewhat anticipated Thomas Gordon, the "snoring Silenus" of

spired by the Erench Encyclopaedists in 1728 by Walpole's friend

the second Dunciad.

Gordon was an "unsparing

hood." He compared

Tacitus with

St.

critic of the priest-

Jerome to the advantage of the

former: "in Tacitus you have the good sense and breeding of a Gentle-

man; in the Saint the rage and dreams of a Monk" (Discourse II in The Works of Tacitus, I, i, p. 49). I suspect that when in 1752 the Reverend Thomas Hunter published his Observations on Tacitus. In which his character as a writer and an historian, is impartially considered, and compared with that of Livy he was hitting at Gordon as much as at Tacitus. It is no wonder that Gordon found a Erench publisher during the Revolution.

Meanwhile

the enlightened Tacitus of d'Alembert

and Gibbon had

advanced further and had turned into a revolutionary republican: "Et son

nom

taire,

prononce

1806).

fait palir les

He was

tyrans" (M.-J. Chenier, Epttre a Vol-

a republican to be used against tyrannies of every

kind. Camille Desmoulins quoted Tacitus tus

— against Robespierre

Alfieri fed

on

Jacopo Ortis, equally

commits

rather,

Gordon's Taci-

pages of his Vieux Cordelier. Vittorio

in the

Tacitus' works,

— or

and

hostile to

in Eoscolo's juvenile novel the hero,

monarchic and to democratic

suicide after having translated "the

terror,

whole second book of the

Annals and the greater part of the second of the Histories." The mere

name

of Tacitus

made Napoleon

about the part played by Tacitus

I

angry.

We

could

tell

a long story

in the struggle against the

Caesarism

1

'

'

of both Napoleons. Erench intellectuals were divided between those

who admired

Caesar and those

who admired Tacitus. The

Bonapartist

j

Revue Contemporaine was

definitely against Tacitus.

The Revue des

Deux Mondes can approximately be described as pro-Tacitus. Gaston Boissier, who wrote the best book on Tacitus of the nineteenth century, was a contributor to the Revue des Deux Mondes. The

battle over Erench

— and the word Caesarism was episode of modern 1850 —was the

Caesarism

vented by Auguste Romieu in

in-

last

j

and

Tacitus

political life in

This

is

129

the Tacitist Tradition

which Tacitus played a

not to deny that in even more

ing Fascism or the Vichy regime

modern

political passions.

Tacitus, for instance,

—

for instance, dur-

Concetto Marchesi's well-known book on

was written

about modern problems as

battle

unsophisticated role.

recent times

—books on Tacitus were inspired by in hatred of

Fascism (1924). But in

became

increasingly difficult to

the course of the nineteenth century talk

direct,

if

it

they were

about Caesarism closed an epoch

Roman

ones.

The French

—which had started

at the be-

ginning of the sixteenth century.

For three centuries Tacitus taught modern readers what tyranny

No

is.

doubt there were philosophers and moralists, from Plato to Epic-

tetus, ject.

who had something

But philosophers talk

uals.

Fie

was so

very important to convey on the same subin abstract terms. Tacitus

lucid, so

portrayed individ-

memorable, that no philosopher could

was Tacitus who transmitted the ancient experience of tyranny to modern readers. Other historians and biographers such as Diodorus, Suetonius, and Plutarch were far less authoritative: they had been unable to produce a convincing life-size picture of a despot. Thucydides, Xenophon, Polybius, Livy, Sallust, competed with each other for the attention of the modern reader in the matter of republican government. Tacitus on despotism was left without rival. True, at least in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the image of the Tacitean despot was reproduced for the benefit of the modern reader in works of political theory rather than in books of history. I have already explained why this is perhaps not surprising. It was compete with him.

It

—

—

the essence of Tacitism to furnish indirectly that analysis of the political

contemporary situation which

— and perhaps

cult

also

more

it

would have been

politically

plain historical works. But this

is

perhaps the

historiography of these two centuries studies

dangerous

is

technically

diffi-

—to formulate

moment

to

add that the

insufficiently explored,

on the imitation of ancient models are needed

in

especially.

and

Mar-

John Hayward, William Camden, Grotius, Davila, and later Johannes Miiller are names that immediately come to mind as historians iana,

who admired and

imitated Tacitus. Flow

exact forms of this imitation? Similarly

I

much do we know about the do not know of an adequate

study of A.-N. Amelot de La Houssaye, the greatest Tacitist of France

130

Tacitus

and

the Tacitist Tradition

and the translator of Baltasar Gracian, who was also the writer of the Histoire du Gouvernement de Venise (1676), a classic in the interpretation of the Venetian constitution.

tury there are

historians

still

way

itate Tacitus in a

who

requiring

Even

in the early nineteenth cen-

stylistically

and psychologically im-

some explanation. Such

are the three

most important Italian historians of that time, Carlo Botta, Pietro Coland Carlo Troya. Indeed

letta,

it is

impossible to describe Italian his-

toriography of the early nineteenth century without reference to Tacitus.

The

authority as a source for the history of the

man

ucated

not

Roman

his

in

Empire. Every ed-

read Tacitus, accepted his picture of Tiberius and Nero,

and learned from It is

was inherent

influence of Tacitus as a historian

how

it

to understand the psychology of tyranny.

why such a situation should change in the and why the change first became apparent in Ger-

difficult to see

nineteenth century,

many. The Romantic revolution gave preference to those historians

who

expressed conflicts of ideas rather than conflicts of personalities.

To be

called a pragmatic historian

circles.

At the very beginning

became

a

term of abuse

in certain

of the nineteenth century Schelling de-

clared that Herodotus and Thucydides were to be preferred to Polybius

and

Tacitus.

ment was

At

least as far as

Thucydides was concerned,

generally accepted. Later, under the guidance of

the studies

on the Roman Empire were

could contribute

Tacitus

was declared

less

Mommsen,

increasingly directed towards

the provinces, the army, the administration itus

his judge-

—

all

subjects to

which Tac-

than the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum.

to be the least military of the historians

accused of being badly informed about

Roman

and was

provincial administra-

was also shown that he followed his sources very closely which seemed to cast a shadow on his competence as a historian. All tion. It

the basic criticisms were a

famous memoir

Tacitus'

judgement of

definition of Tacitus as a monarchist

Mommsen

life

In

under the emperors.

from despair comes from

himself was a pessimistic supporter of the

Empire. But scholars

bound

Mommsen.

1870 he opened a new phase in the analysis of the He himself refrained from any derogatory remark

and always respected him.

or at least confirmed by

of

sources of Tacitus.

The

made

who

followed

Mommsen

German

too narrowly were

to dislike or to underrate Tacitus.

Admirers of Tacitus had to

try various lines of defence.

Some

did

and

Tacitus

131

the Tacitist Tradition

him by pointing out that he was not a pragmatic but an artist. This was a vahd defence against ScheUing's

their best to cover

historian,

—"Kunst"— above everything

criticism because ScheUing put art In this sense

J.

W.

Siivern wrote his

else.

famous paper Ueber den Kunst-

charakter des Tacitus, pubhshed by the Berhn

Academy

in 1823.

Other

students of historiography suggested that Polybius and Tacitus were

nearer than Herodotus and Thucydides to Christian truth and were therefore to be preferred. But the definition of Tacitus as an artist could easily turn into

an admission that he was not a historian. At the end of

Mommsen, proclaimed Tacitus a poet, one of the few great poets Rome had ever had, only to damn him as a historian. Few or none of those people who dethe century Friedrich Leo,

who owed

so

much

to

fended Tacitus in Germany were so bold or so naive as to say that Tacitus

was

French scholars

true, as

still

did. Finally, the negative appre-

ciation of Tacitus prevailed everywhere, even in France,

found

his steadiest admirers, as the

baud showed. Today we can

where he had

works by Ph. Fabia and

E.

Cour-

see the point of these nineteenth-century discussions

about the merits of Tacitus without having to agree. The dispute about Tacitus has definitely passed to another stage. Tacitus has his

own

ob-

vious limits. Within these limits there can be no doubt on our part that

he saw something essential: the demoralisation that goes together with despotism. Mussolini and Hitler and Stalin have done something for his reputation.

Furthermore,

we cannot now

judge an ancient writer

without asking ourselves what he represented in the history of mediaeval

and modern humanism. The transition from the

public to the of

Roman

He

is

Re-

Principate remains to the present day a problem

immediate relevance to

out Tacitus.

Roman

us.

our master

This would never have happened within the

study of despotism. His methods

can be applied, and have been applied, to other periods. His analysis of

human

motives has been discussed, and often accepted, by the lead-

ing moralists of the last centuries. But there

is

perhaps something even

more immediate to be said about Tacitus. He was interested in individual men and women. He went beyond appearances and made an effort to interpret their minds. He wrote as a man who was inside the process of tyrannical corruption which he was describing. He makes us realise that we, too, are inside. simpler and

CHAPTER

SIX

The

Origins of Ecclesiastical Historiography

I

The connection between ecclesiastical history and fireworks is perhaps not the most obvious. But at least in one case fireworks demonstrably helped the study of ecclesiastical history. The name of Benedetto Bacchini stands out among the learned Benedictine monks of the end of the seventeenth century. Born in Parma in 1661, he was the first Italian to apply the

methods of research on mediaeval history which

Mabillon had made authoritative trust of Bacchini's cles of

work

in

in France.

both the

But there was much

dis-

and the courtly

cir-

his character did

not

ecclesiastical

Parma and Modena where he worked, and

not so

He had, however, one asset which was of course uncommon among seventeenth-century scholars as it is now: he

knew

engineering and chemistry. This enabled him to preside success-

make

fully

things easier.

over the preparations for the fireworks to celebrate the wedding

of Rinaldo d'Este

and

Duke

Modena

was asked

in

1696. The

Duke was

pleased;

1697 to take charge of the Ducal many other Italian libraries, had been sadly ne-

as a result Bacchini

Library, which, like

of

in

glected in the previous century. His commission only lasted a

little

more than a year. The journal which he edited and indeed wrote almost single-handed, // Giornale dei Letterati^ incurred the Inquisition's displeasure with its defence of the Bollandist Papebrochius. The Giornale was soon stopped, and Bacchini was ordered to go back to the bursar. Not even Montfaucon, who his monastery as cellerarius was in Italy at the time, could save him from this rather uncongenial task. But the one year during which Bacchini was free to examine the

—

132

Ecclesiastical Historiography

133

manuscripts of the Ducal Library was sufficient for the discovery with

which Bacchini's name

is

connected forever

—the

discovery of the

was really a rediscovery. The ninth-century chronicle of the Bishopric of Ravenna had been read in Ravenna itself by learned humanists of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, such as Flavio Biondo and Giovanni Pietro Ferretti. But the later and most important historian of Ravenna, Hieronymus Rubaeus or Gerolamo Rossi, who wrote about 1590, was unable to consult it and complained that it had disappeared from the Bishop's library. The copy which Bacchini found in Modena in 1697 does not seem to have been that which had disappeared from Ravenna before 1590. It was a manuscript of the fifteenth century. The chronicle of Agnellus was still a very controversial document several centuries after its compilation. So controversial was its character that this probably explains why it was taken away from Ravenna in the sixteenth century. It was certainly Liber Pontificalis of Agnellus of Ravenna.

to cause Bacchini

many

troubles

It

when he

tried to publish

it

about

1705.

The author of the chronicle, Agnellus, a priest circa 820 and 845, compiled his Liber Pontificalis for his fellow priests of the

in

Ravenna between

as a series of lectures

Capitolum of Ravenna. Though he

lived at

when the see of Ravenna had become reconciled to subordinato Rome, he felt plainly nostalgic for those proud days in which

a time tion

the Archbishop of

Ravenna with

the help of

Byzantium had defied

Rome and claimed total independence, autokephalia. He tells with obvious relish how Archbishop Maurus died in 671 after having advised his successors never to accept the insignia of their dignity

lium die (P.

—from Rome:

Romae

"Pallium ab imperatore petite,

subiugati fueritis,

—the

pal-

quacumque enim

non

eritis integri.

was

particularly serious

Et his dictis obiit"

L. 106, col. 673).

One

of Agnellus' allegations

be overlooked in any ecclesiastical controversy.

He

and could not

stated that in the

Emperor Valentinianus III had granted the Bishop of Ravenna the rank of Archbishop and had consequently given him the pallium. As we all know, the right to confer the pallium is one of the most jealously defended prerogatives of the Pope of Rome: no early fifth century the

Archbishop

is

considered to be in legitimate possession of his see un-

Ecclesiastical Historiography

134

and obtained from the Pope, the insignia of the practice going back perhaps to the fourth century and a

he has asked

less

A

palHum.

for,

theory certainly well established by the eighth century invested the pal-

lium with a transcendental meaning and made

it

a

symbol of papal au-

and practice had been the subject of controversy since the time of the Reformation, and doubts about the exclusive right

thority over the other metropolitan churches. Both theory

of the conferment of the pallium of the Pope to grant the pallium

had been expressed not only by non-

Catholics but also by the supporters of the Gallican the Catholic Church.

Any

text purporting to

show

movement within that between the

fourth and the sixth century of Christianity the emperor had conferred the pallium

on every

upon

side. It

a bishop

might

was consequently bound

set a

to rouse passions

dangerous precedent even

in the seven-

teenth century. Well before Bacchini's rediscovery of Agnellus other

authentic cases of conferment of the pallium by

Roman and

early Byz-

antine emperors had already been noted and collected by religious controversialists of the seventeenth century.

The most formidable case

for

the right of an emperor or king to grant the pallium to the bishops of his

own

territory

had been stated by the Parisian Archbishop

Marca: and forty years Marca's work was of

Rome

still

after

posthumous appearance

its

at the centre of the controversy

in

Pierre de

1669 de

about the rights

over the French Church.

To complicate matters, Agnellus' was not the only evidence alleged conferment jf the pallium

man Emperor

Valentinianus.

A

for the

on the Bishop of Ravenna by the Ro-

document

and sixteenth centuries claimed to be the

circulating in the fifteenth

text of the grant by Valentin-

John of Ravenna. But Baronius had had no difficulty in proving that this was a forged document. Although some obdurate opponents of the rights of Rome such as A. M. De Dominis were unwilling to take notice of Baronius' exposure, the most serious scholian III to Bishop

—

—

ars of the seventeenth century findings.

— on both

sides

—had

all

accepted his

The question was reopened, however, when Bacchini drew

at-

tention to the statement by Agnellus in the Liber Pontificalis, thus im-

plying that tradition lent

was

some support

to the forged document.

Here

a historian of the ninth century, demonstrably independent of the

forged document,

who

yet maintained with precise details that a

Ro-

Ecclesiastical Historiography

man Emperor

135

—not a Roman Pope —had conferred the palhum on the

Bishop of Ravenna. The statement was the more impressive because Agnellus, for

all his

was

partisan viev^s,

clearly a very learned

man: he

had a habit of quoting documents, of using pictures and inscriptions which could not but impress a world of antiquar-

to support his facts, ians such as that in

which Bacchini

lived.

Bacchini himself was on the whole a keen supporter of the Church

Rome and had no wish to scandalise his readers. But he was not the man to dismiss a piece of evidence because it was inconvenient, and as

of

a follower of the Maurists he

was ready

to admit a certain

evolution in the development of Christian institutions. later, in

1724, the posthumous

the Maurist

Dom

work on

sible

in

rights

the

Emperor

could not

— one of the master-

feel that there

known

is

ex-

this as yet. In

was anything reprehen-

Valentinian's having conferred metropolitan

on the Bishop of Ravenna. This

is

not to say that he was pre-

pared to accept Agnellus' statement about Valentinian is

few years

which the same point of view

pressed. But of course Bacchini could not have his heart Bacchini really

A

of

the history of the pallium by

Thierry Ruinart was published

pieces of the Benedictine school, in

amount

impossible to say whether Agnellus

is

correct.

III:

even

now

it

But Bacchini was ob-

two minds about the origins of the Archbishopric of Ravenna, and his doubts went so far as to involve the whole history of

viously in

the metropolitan sees in the

first

centuries of the Church.

He

could not

share the prevailing view that the organisation of the Church reflected

Roman

the organisation of the

Empire. His book of 1703 on the

origins of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, in

which he formulated an

alter-

was allowed to pass. The edition of Agnellus Ravennas with introduction and commentary which he submitted to the ecclesiastical authorities in 1705 met with definite disapproval. At a certain point the Inquisition intervened and requested Bacchini to surrender all his papers on Agnellus: at the same time the Librarian of the Duke of Modena, L. A. Muratori, who was native theory, caused

Bacchini's pupil, Pontificalis of

dissent but

was asked not

Ravenna.

consented to write a nellus'

some

to allow outsiders to read the Liber

Finally, a

new

compromise was reached. Bacchini

preface in which he had to declare that Ag-

statement on the pallium was utterly incredible and wicked

136

and

Ecclesiastical Historiography

after

many

further negotiations about details the Liber Pontificalis

could appear in 1708.

It

was

incidentally the last

book Bacchini was

permitted to publish. At least two others were stopped by censorship. I

have dwelt on

also because

I

feel

not only because

this episode it

serves to bring

distinctive features of ecclesiastical history

An

clesiastical historiography.

event of the

plications for the eighteenth century in

known, but ec-

century as told by a

lo-

still

— and not only

had

practical im-

in

Ravenna, but

Christendom. Both the continuity of Church history and

the interrelation between local events and general principles of life

of the

— and consequently of

fifth

cal ecclesiastical historian of the ninth century

everywhere

it is little

home most immediately one

Church

are illustrated in our episode. Precedents of course matter in any

kind of history

— and there

is

nothing in the past that in certain circum-

stances cannot provoke passions in the present.

We

have had the lan-

guage of the Macedonians about 350 B.C. or the evacuation of Roman Dacia in a.d. 270 debated by our own contemporaries as if they were questions of

life

does precedent

or death for a

mean

so

much

be relevant to the

its

may be

But

Church through

which happened

present. Furthermore

Church conformity with

trine

state.

The very concenturies makes it

is

the

in the

— and

the origins

this

Church's past should is

most

essential

—

in

evidence of truth. This doc-

interpreted differently in the various denominations; but

it is

never absent in any of them.

with

its

original principles

The Church knows

and

its

A

Church

that consciously breaks

original institutions

is

inconceivable.

a return to the principles, not a break with the

principles. This in a sense simplifies the task of the

He

no other history

in

as in ecclesiastical history.

tinuity of the institution of the

inevitable that anything

modern

Church

historian.

has to write the history of an institution which began in a precise

moment, had an original structure, and developed with clear changes. It is for him to judge where the change implies a betrayal of the original purposes of the institution. On the other hand the historian of the Church is inevitably faced with the difficulty of having continuously to relate the events of individual local churches to the corpus

of the Ecclesia universalis.

the

methods of writing

satisfied

From

this follow certain

ecclesiastical history.

mysticum

consequences for

Other historians can be

with simply retelling the past. The chances that they will be

Ecclesiastical Historiography

137

challenged are few. The historian of the Church

knows

that at any

point he will be challenged. The questions with which he deals are con-

And

troversial.

the controversy

—the two are

fact

and theory. Any

bound

The question

interrelated.

lium by Valentinian

III

—

never one of pure

is

also to be a theologian. But

produce evidence. torians

is

who

What

is

if

he

is

or of pure

of the granting of the pal-

to return to our case

ecclesiastical historian

dogma

—was one of both

fact

believes in Christianity

is

challenged on facts, he must

unmistakably apparent

in ecclesiastical his-

the care for their documentation.

Plenty of documents are already to be found in the earliest ecclesiastical historians

—Eusebius, Socrates, Sozomenus, Theodoretus: they

had adopted the scholarly habits

of the Alexandrian antiquarians

grammarians. They are properly described by Sozomenus:

"I

and

have

sought for records of events of earlier date amongst the established laws appertaining to religion, amongst the proceedings of the synods of the period,

amongst the

kings and priests.

Some

of these

I

thought seriously,

on further

reflection

I

at

deemed

in the epistles of

documents are preserved

and churches, and others are dispersed, and learned.

and

novelties that arose,

in palaces

in the possession of the

one time, of transcribing the whole, but it

better,

on account of the

prolixity of

the documents, to give merely a brief synopsis of their contents" (Book I,

I, transl. E.

ond edition

Walford, London, 1855,

of the

first

books of

covered texts of Athanasius, finus.

For the

moment

it is

p. 11). Socrates

his Ecclesiastical

who

when he

dis-

enough to remind ourselves that the very in ecclesiastical history

pelled the ecclesiastical historians to quote is

History

contradicted his previous source, Ru-

importance of precedent and tradition an extent which

prepared a sec-

seldom to be found

com-

documentary evidence

to

in political historians.

Further research will have to establish where Agnellus found inspiration for his extensive use of literary and archaeological evidence. But

even in the ninth century his

is

not an isolated case of care for docu-

mentation. Anastasius Bibliothecarius' contributions to the

Roman

Liber Pontificalis are supported by his minute knowledge of the papal archives. In the tenth century Flodoard of Rheims, the author of the

Historia Remensis ecclesiae, was a formidable erudit: he seems to have

undertaken a journey from Rheims to

Rome

to collect documents.

138

Ecclesiastical Historiography

About 1080 Adam of Bremen used an extraordinary quantity of original documents and excerpts from earlier chronicles in his Gesta Hammaburgensis ecclesiae pontificum. Later of

Malmesbury displayed antiquarian

William

in the twelfth century

On

learning in his

the Antiquity

Church of Glastonbury. John of Salisbury in his Historia Pontificalis proves to be an expert critic of the authenticity of papal resof the

cripts (ch. 43).

We

have defined what seem to us some of the essential elements of

ecclesiastical historiography: the

and

continuous interrelation of

facts; the transcendental significance attributed to the

the origins; the emphasis

on

sal

Church. But with

of the features of the

this

period of

factual evidence; the ever present

of relating events of local churches to the mystical

we have done

first ecclesiastical

little

body

more than

history

—the

problem

of the Univerto define

to write a history of the

liever,

he opened a

new

some

Ecclesiastical His-

tory of Eusebius of Caesarea. In so far as Eusebius of Caesarea first

dogma

Church from the point

was

the

of view of the be-

period in the history of historiography. Indeed

one may doubt whether any other ancient historian made such an impact on successive generations as he did. The

shared his faith in the Church

— and

men who

this created a

bond

followed him that

no pagan

historian could establish with his Christian followers, nor indeed with his

pagan colleagues.

II

Simple and majestic Eusebius of Caesarea claims for himself the merit of having invented ecclesiastical history. This merit cannot be disputed.

The search

for Eusebius' precursors started very early:

been begun, perhaps not surprisingly, by one of

his

it

had

immediate contin-

Sozomenus thought that Eusebius had been preceded as an ecclesiastical historian by Clemens, Hegesippus, and Julius Africanus. None of these names can really compete with that of Eusebius. The Clemens to whom Sozomenus alluded was the alleged auuators, Sozomenus.

thor of the Gospel of Peter

Africanus

is

Hegesippus

—not an

ecclesiastical history; Sextus Julius

more mysterious does not seem to have

the well-known chronographer; and the

— quoted

—

by Eusebius himself

Ecclesiastical Historiography

139

written an ecclesiastical history at

from the fragments he appears

all:

to have been an anti-Gnostic apologist of the second century a.d. Eu-

sebius defines the purpose of his

have purposed to record

work

in the

opening paragraph:

"I

in writing the successions of the sacred apos-

covering the period stretching from our Saviour to ourselves; the

tles

number and

character of the transactions recorded in the history of the

who were distinguished in her governthe number of those who in each generation were the amof the word of God either by speech or pen; the names, the

Church; the number of those

ment

.

.

.

;

bassadors

number and

the age of those

who, driven by

the desire of innovation

to an extremity of error, have heralded themselves as the introducers of

Knowledge,

falsely so called.

To

this

I

will

add the

fate

which has

moreover the number and nawhole nation of the Jews ture and times of the wars waged by the heathen against the divine beset the

.

.

.

furthermore the martyrdoms" (Loeb). In a sense Eusebius word was the most unlikely person to have invented ecclesiastical history. .

.

.

His other masterpiece, Praeparatio evangelica, tempts ever

We

thought. into

two

made

to

show

one of the boldest

at-

continuity between pagan and Christian

should hardly expect the same

parts

is

— one devoted to the wordly

man

to

affairs

want to cut history of war and politics,

the other to the origin and development of the Christian Church. But the witness of the last persecution and the adviser and apologist of

Constantine was in a vantage position to appreciate the autonomy and strength of the institution that

had compelled the Roman

render at the Milvian Bridge in 312.

pagan

cultural heritage in the

ious, as astical

we

shall

History

soon

see, to

new

Though anxious

Christian order

state to sur-

to preserve the

—indeed very anx-

use the pagan tradition for his Ecclesi-

—Eusebius knew that the Christians were a nation, and

a victorious nation at that;

and that

their history could

not be told ex-

cept within the framework of the Church in which they lived. Further-

more, he was well aware that the Christian nation was what virtue of Its

its

it

was by

being both the oldest and the newest nation of the world.

origins were twofold: coeval with the creation of the

coeval with the birth of the

Roman Empire

world and yet

under Augustus. True,

this

nation had no unique series of leaders to be compared with the succession of

monarchs

of other states. But the succession of the bishops in

140

Ecclesiastical Historiography

the apostolic sees represented the continuity of the legitimate heirs of Christ; whereas the preservation of the purity of the original teaching

of the Apostles gave internal unity to the Church. Apostolic succession

and doctrinal orthodoxy its

new

w^ere the pillars of the

enemies the persecutors and the

heretics.

Thus

Christian nation;

ecclesiastical history

replaced the battles of ordinary political history by the in resistance to persecution It is

him

obvious that

the

and

trials

inherent

heresy.

developing this conception Eusebius had before

in

Old Testament, Flavins Josephus, and

the Acts of the Apostles.

Each of these contributed something: the struggle against the persecutors had its precedents in the Books of Maccabees if not elsewhere;

was both

and in Josephus (and had been developed by earlier apologists); the spreading of Christianity had its classic document in the Acts of the Apostles. But in each case the differences were more marked than the similarities. In fact one the idea of a holy nation

in the Bible

that there was no continuation to the Acts of the Apostles. They remained a document of the heroic age of Christianity, to be put together with the Gosof the important factors of Christian historiography

pels.

More than two hundred

years later Eusebius

is

made

a

new

start

on

a completely different basis: he was not primarily concerned with the

spread of Christianity by propaganda and miracle, but with of persecution and heresy from which

it

was

very fact that heresy in the Christian sense

from Josephus and plays

is

to

its

survival

emerge victorious. The

absent from the Bible and

as yet only a very small part in the Acts of the

Apostles indicates the novelty of his approach. There was, however,

one kind of account considerably.

we

find

it

in

in

pagan historiography that could help Eusebius

That was the history of philosophical schools

— such

as

Diogenes Laertius. To begin with, the idea of "succession,"

was equally important in philosophical schools and in Eunotion of Christianity. The bishops were the diadochoi of the

biaboxr\, sebius'

Apostles, just as the scholarchai were the diadochoi of Plato, Zeno,

and Epicurus. Second, hke any philosophical school Christianity had its

orthodoxy and

its

deviationists. Third, historians of philosophy in

Greece used antiquarian methods and quoted documents

much more

frequently and thoroughly than their colleagues, the political historians.

A

glance at Diogenes Laertius

is

enough to show how pleased he

Ecclesiastical Historiography

is

141

to produce original evidence for both the doctrine

and the external

vicissitudes of the philosophical schools he examines. Eusebius recog-

nised the importance of documents for his History. As original evidence

was

essential to establish the rightful claims of or-

thodoxy against external persecutors and internal

we can

again

dissidents.

Here

be certain that Jew^ish influences were not without im-

portance for Eusebius. The idea of scholarly succession to rabbinic thought, of

said, direct

I

which had developed

in its turn

is

fundamental

under the impact

Greek theory. Moreover, Flavius Josephus had produced ample doc-

uments whenever he considered

it

necessary to prove Jewish rights;

and documents were of course a conspicuous feature of the Books of Maccabees. But on the whole

was Hellenistic scholarship that Eunew model of ecclesiastical history. In

it

drew upon to shape the this he was faithful to the Hellenistic tradition of his teachers and to his own programme in the Praeparatio evangelica. The immense authority which Eusebius gained was well deserved. sebius

He had

continuators but no

rivals.

The

translation of his Ecclesiastical

History into Latin by Rufinus was the starting point for ecclesiastical writing in the West. In the simplicity of of

its

the

it

was

and

in the

Ecclesiastical History of Eusebius

model elaborated by ancient historians

the last

of later generations

sius,

—

if

we

which became a model

The

matter

was one

was

It

Constantinian age,

the

cution. Eusebius' History of

for the ben-

method was formidable but perhaps applied to the post-

if

Church was no longer isolated by persethe Church ideally reflected the moment

which the Church had emerged victorious under Constantine

separate

body within

the

Roman

Empire. With

all his gifts

which

it

would be impossible

to separate

apparent as soon as the Christians were safely

man

state.

to

real duality in

was bound

in

situ-

what belonged

Caesar from what belonged to Christ. There was a very Eusebius' notion of ecclesiastical history which

—

Eusebius

could not shape his historiography in such a way as to envisage ations in

in-

except the Life of Antony by Athana-

especially deceptive

when

of

for later hagiography.

simplicity of Eusebius'

also deceptive.

in

structure

most authoritative prototypes ever created by ancient thought:

deed efit

documentation the

its

command

to

become

of the

Ro-

On the one hand ecclesiastical history was the history of the

142

Ecclesiastical Historiography

now

Christian nation pire.

On

the other

emerging as the ruUng

hand

it

was

class of the

Roman Em-

the history of a divine institution not

contaminated by pohtical problems. As the history of the new ruling class of the

tary

and

Roman Empire

political events.

siastical history

was

ecclesiastical history

had

to include mili-

But as a history of divine institutions

restricted to

mained a major problem

Church

eccle-

events. This duality has re-

for all the ecclesiastical historians since

Eusebius: no ecclesiastical historian has ever been able to concentrate exclusively

on

ecclesiastical affairs.

Even the immediate continuators

of Eusebius were compelled to take cognizance of culties

some

of those diffi-

which are inevitably connected with the very notion of

Church:

how to

deal with this divine institution's very earthly relations

with other institutions in terms of power, violence, and even claims.

which

A it

Church

exercises

tend to coalesce, lion,

a divine

in

power can hardly separate

itself

territorial

from the

State in

power. Furthermore, wherever Church and State

its it is

difficult to

separate heresy from political rebel-

dogmatic differences from court

factions.

How would the contin-

uators of Eusebius deal with the politics of the emperors, the political intrigues of the bishops?

we had the Christian History which the priest Philip of Side wrote about 430, we would know more about the difficulties of shaping an If

ecclesiastical history

and about the significance of the predominance of

the Eusebian model.

It is

way and

evident that Philip of Side tried to go his

own

to avoid imitating Eusebius. His Christian History started

with the origins of the world and included a great deal of natural ence and mathematics, not to speak of geography. to provide a Christian encyclopaedia in the

soon forgotten. The certain

amount

real continuators of

He

form of

sci-

apparently tried history.

He was

Eusebius always included a

of political history in their works. Quite typically they

subdivided their histories according to the periods marked, not by bishops or metropolitans, but by

None

Roman

emperors.

of the ecclesiastical historians of Late Antiquity ever claimed

to have rendered political history superfluous.

presupposed the existence of other types of

More

history.

or less clearly they

More

particularly

they recognised the existence of political history. The point practical importance because

it

means that

is

of great

the rise of ecclesiastical his-

Ecclesiastical Historiography

143

tory did not entail an interruption in the writing of ordinary political history. True, in the fourth

mainly

left in

and

fifth

centuries political history

the hands of pagans, such as

comachus Flavianus, and Zosimus. But

Ammianus

was

Marcellinus, Ni-

the fact that, according to Eu-

human

was no discouragement from reading Thucydides. The door was kept open for sebius,

Thucydides described the wickedness of the

a Christian political historian like Procopius,

acknowledged Herodotus and Thucydides If

Eusebius had no

rival,

none of

from

least three historians,

in the sixth century

as his masters.

was so authoritative Thucydides was continued

his successors

or persuasive as to exclude rivals. Just as

by at

who

race

Eusebius had at least four successors (apart

his translator Rufinus),

each starting from where he

left off.

Three of these are preserved and well known. Socrates dealt with the period from 303 to 439, Sozomenus from 303 to 421, Theodoretus

from 303 to 428. Before them there had been Gelasius, Bishop of Caesarea between circa 365 and 400. The recovery of his lost work is one of the impressive achievements of patristic studies of this century. Gelasius

undoubtedly continued Eusebius' Ecclesiastical History. Rufinus

seems to have translated

added Books

X

Socrates and

at least part of Gelasius of

and XI to

his translation of

Sozomenus were lawyers

Caesarea when he

Eusebius into Latin. living in Constantinople;

was very concerned with doctrinal differences within the Church. He treats them with the urbanity of a man who would rather do without them, though he has some sympathy with the Novatiani. Sozomenus, who makes large use of Socrates, is far more worldly than his mentor. He accepts the fact that by now Christianity is a state affair: in dedicating his work to Theodosius II he invites him to revise and censor what he has written. It is an open question whether Theodosius II exercised his censorship on Sozomenus. Theodoretus takes us outside the capital. He was a provincial who had been deeply involved in the doctrinal controversies. He maintains an ominous silence on the Nestorian dispute of which he was one of they were close to the imperial court. Socrates

the protagonists, but

otherwise outspoken, even brutal, in his par-

He warns the emperors that if they fail in their duty orthodoxy they may be punished by God on the battlefield. How-

tisan judgements.

to

is

Ecclesiastical Historiography

144 ever unpleasant Theodoretus voice.

Nor can we and

heresies

may

be at times, his

book on

separate his ecclesiastical history from his

monks he had know^n,

the Historia Religiosa.

The contemporaries themselves were aware the truth.

a very genuine

profoundly pious and credulous account of the Syrian

his

sarea, Socrates,

is

that Gelasius of Cae-

Sozomenus, and Theodoretus were

About 475 Gelasius

partial witnesses to

of Cyzicus tried to write a history of the

ecclesiastical events of the East under Constantine (mainly about the

Council of Nicaea) by combining Eusebius, Gelasius of Caesarea, Ru-

and Theodoretus and adding

finus, Socrates,

the sixth century Socrates,

original documents. In

Theodorus Lector conceived the idea of conflating

Sozomenus, and Theodoretus

this idea so pleased

in a Historia Tripartita,

and

Cassiodorus that he had the work of Theodorus

Lector partly translated and partly imitated in the Historia Tripartita in

which Epiphanius was

history of Philostorgius

his collaborator. If

—which

is

we had

the

whole of the

preserved only in excerpts

—we

could see more clearly where these orthodox continuators of Eusebius

went wrong. An Arian

of the

Eunomian

was same time and on the

variety, Philostorgius

their

contemporary and wrote almost

same

subject: his Ecclesiastical History started with the origins of the

at the

Arian controversy and went as far as a.d. 425. Being an Arian, Philostorgius was not complacent about the state of affairs in the Roman Empire.

He adopted

clear apocalyptic tones

the disaster of Adrianopolis in 378

secution of the Arians.

410, which

is

He saw

and liked to believe that

was not unconnected with

the importance of the sack of

the per-

Rome

in

not mentioned by Theodoretus and only perfunctorily

noticed by Socrates (VII, 10). The relatively more thoughtful remarks

on the subject by Sozomenus

(IX,

9—10) may well be due

cases) to the influence of Philostorgius.

loyal the three

orthodox

and how comparatively uninterested

side

it.

is

more

other

indeed remarkable

ecclesiastical historians

pire

Nothing

It is

(as in

how

remained to the Em-

what was happening

out-

instructive for their outlook than to see

how

in

they deal with the Christians outside the Empire. They devote

little

space to them, and almost invariably merely in order to discuss some specific

measure of the

Roman

emperors. This

is

of course in keeping

Ecclesiastical Historiography

145

with the general trend of Christian propaganda, which was not very interested in the conversion of pagans outside the Empire.

Ill After Justinian

it

became impossible

in the

West and

difficult in the

East to think historically in terms of a Universal Church. With the loss of the

tory

West

was

to the

Empire the oecumenical horizon of the Eusebian

difficult to

even as a

fiction.

his-

maintain. Christianity was no longer one nation,

Even

in the East

too

much

of

it

was outside

the sphere

controlled by the emperors of Constantinople. Moreover,

Church

events were becoming identical with state events; the great public controversies

about heresy were being replaced by court

—

than that in

after the sixth century the East

intrigues.

seems to have

More

lost interest

oecumenical history altogether. Ecclesiastical history here followed

in the

wake

of the general decline of historiography.

copius and Agathias

is

who wrote

ended

of Pro-

also the last great age of ecclesiastical histo-

riography in the East. As far as sus,

The age

in Syria

I

know, the monophysite John of Ephe-

about 585, and Euagrius Scholasticus,

his history after 594, are the last ecclesiastical historians

who who

can claim direct descent from Eusebius. The Byzantine historian Ni-

cephorus Callistus,

who

tried to revive ecclesiastical history

about

— under the impact of the new connections with the West— regretted that Euagrius had had no successor. Thus the gap was 1320

clearly

openly acknowledged in the East. In the West, as far as

I

can judge, the

was more complex. Historiography in general was more vital, and ecclesiastical historiography had a share in this vitality. True, the first impression is that there was no place for a separate ecclesiastical historiography in the Middle Ages. Men thought in terms of fall and redemption: they divided the history of the world into three situation

stages

ante legem, sub lege, sub gratia

clear distinction civitates

was

between Church and

— and did not know of any

State.

Even the notion of duae

reinterpreted by Otto of Freising (about 114 5) in the

sense that from the times of Theodosius

I

to his

own

times one civitas

permixta was the substance of history: "a temporis Theodosii senioris

146

Ecclesiastical Historiography

usque ad tempus nostrum non iam de duabus

civitatibus,

immo

de una

pene, id est ecclesia, sed permixta, historiam texuisse" (M. G. H., Scriptores

t.

XX, Hannover,

1868, 118-301). Otto had learned more

from Orosius than from Augustine.

am

I

historians of ecclesiastical historiography partita by Cassiodorus to the

not surprised that modern

jump from

Magdeburg Centuriae

the Historia Tri-

(1559). This

is

in

keeping with the distrust of the Western Church for the philo-Arian Eusebius which

is

L. 59, col. 161)

(P.

logian Melchor

eloquently expressed in the Decretum Gelasianum

and which was

Cano

reiterated by the great Spanish theo-

in the eleventh

written a few years before the

books written between the

first

sixth

like the

and

it

Venerable Bede,

of his

De

and the fourteenth centuries received their copyists) the title of Eccle-

would be very dangerous

Hugo

Locis theologicis,

Centuriae. Yet the fact remains that

(more often by their authors than by siastical History,

book

to

assume that men

of Fleury, Ordericus Vitalis, or

Bremen did not know what they were doing when they

Adam of

entitled their

works. Ordericus Vitalis regarded himself as belonging to a

series of

scriptores ecclesiastici

which includes Eusebius, Orosius, Cassiodorus,

and Paulus Diaconus

(the last as the

opric of Metz). his cloister

which

Rome

is

He

author of a history of the Bish-

modestly admitted that being a

he could not attempt to write the other kind of history

concerned with the

precisely,

affairs

but very eloquently,

a son of the Church of

Greece, and

of Alexandria,

Adam of Bremen

declared that as

Bremen and Hamburg he was obliged

history of the Fathers of his Church. Also

a Historia pontificalis

if

John

Middle Ages

their ancestry,

tell

the

what

not a Historia ecclesiastica, traced his an-

ecclesiastical historians did exist, they

and what matters to us

relation to the type of history First of all,

to

of Salisbury, in

cestry to Luke, Eusebius, Cassiodorus, Orosius, Isidorus,

the

confined to

—the history which Dares Phrygius and Pompeius Trogus wrote.

Not so

was

monk

is

to see

how

which Eusebius had

and Bede. In

had an idea

of

they behaved in

created.

the Eusebian type of history remained well known to the

was at least one attempt to revive it. Eusebius, in Rufinus' translation, was read throughout the Middle Ages. He was of course known to Gregory of Tours, Bede, Isidorus, and there were some eloquent references to his name in Augustine. The very nureaders of the West, and there

Ecclesiastical Historiography

147

merous manuscripts of Rufinus show how much he had been read at least since the ninth century. Even without Rufinus mediaeval clerics

would have been reminded

of the Eusebian type of history by the pop-

ular Historia Tripartita of Cassiodorus-Epiphanius, 137 manuscripts of

which were inspected by

as he

was

utilised

still

most recent

editor.

Sozomenus,

in so far

by the Historia Tripartita, was severely criticised by

Gregory the Great

was

its

at the

end of the sixth century, and

remembered by Anastasius Bibliothecarius

this criticism

in the ninth cen-

was Anastasius who with Johannes Diaconus conceived

tury. It

the

idea of reviving the Eusebian type of universal ecclesiastical history af-

The experiences of the eighth Oecumenical Council of Constantinople, in which Anastasius had taken part as an expert in Greek language and theology, persuaded him that it was indispensable for the Church of Rome to be informed of past ecclesiastical events. He therefore agreed to provide the translation of the Greek authorities upon which Johannes Diaconus was to build a new ecclesiastical history of the Eusebian type avoiding, however, the doctrinal errors for which Gregory the Great had criticised Sozomenus (or Epiphanius). Anastasius speaks of a history which would include all the important events ter 870.

—

since the birth of Christ

—"ut quae ab ipso Christi adventu

gesta sunt et textu ecclesiasticae historiae (P.

G. 108,

history.

col. 1 190).

He was

in Ecclesia

non iudicantur indigna"

clearly thinking of a

Eusebian kind of

But Johannes Diaconus never found the time or the inspiration

to write the history planned by Anastasius: the Eusebian history

was

well remembered, but not revived.

The

would appear to be that the Eusebian form ecclesiastical historiography was abandoned in the West not because ignorance but because of the instinctive search for something more right conclusion

accordance with contemporary needs tional states

and

local units.

—that

is,

of of in

with the creation of na-

At the same time, the abandonment was

not complete because each writer kept faith with the Eusebian premises of the

existence of a Universal

Church and

of the necessity for doc-

umentary evidence. Naturally enough the prevailing pattern of mediaeval ecclesiastical history

is

that

which emphasises

local events of a particular see or

monastery. The writers take Christianity for granted and concentrate

148

Ecclesiastical Historiography

on the individual corporation of social life. The continuity

in

conformity with the prevaiUng trend

of the institution

is

represented by the

succession of bishops or abbots, the contents of the history are a mixture of biography

abbot

is

and

local chronicle.

what happened

to the institution;

church or monastery did

to

what the human enough to is

and freshness of

the sincerity

to forget that king of the

It is difficult

Adam of Bremen,

Hence

to the bishop or

and what he did

—though chroniclers are

register internal squabbles.

accounts.

What happened

their

Danes who, according

"noted attentively and remembered everything the

archbishop drew from the Scriptures, with the exception that he could not be convinced about gluttony and women, which vices are inborn with that people. As to everything

else, the

king was obedient and

yielding to the prelate" (3, 21, transl. F.J. Tschan). Unlike their ancient

and

their

modern

colleagues mediaeval ecclesiastical historians could

And Flodoardus, the historian of the Ecclesia Remensis, reminds us how hard it was to write when there was so little defence

smile.

against bitter winter and books were in short supply (Prologue). But at

no time between the seventh and siastical historians

institution.

the fifteenth centuries were the eccle-

content to be the chroniclers of their

The need

to

Christian community,

go beyond is

it,

own particular

to reach the large

body

of the

apparent everywhere. The notion of the

Church as the Ecclesia Christi is too strong in every historian to allow him to be satisfied with remaining the historian of the Bishopric of Metz or of Rheims or of the Monastery of Saint-Gall. These historians were well aware that their particular institution was only a fragment of Christianity and that in the notion of Christianity there was never any sharp distinction between political and religious affairs. Again and again

we

observe in mediaeval ecclesiastical historians of any century

the transition from local ecclesiastical history to general ecclesiastical history,

to

and even more frequently the

mundane

from Church history

history. Ordericus Vitalis in the early twelfth century

starts as a historian of his

mandy and

transition

own monastery

of Saint-Evroul in

Nor-

ends as a general historian of the Normans, which in the

circumstances means a historian of Byzantines, Crusaders, Saracens

and yet he calls his work Ecclesiastica historia. Even more emphatically his contemporary Hugo of Fleury expands his Ecclesiastica his-

149 toria into a

Chronica mundi, a Weltchronik.

two redactions gle to

shape his history in a satisfactory

having completed the

chronicles which, stitution

whom he

discovered

redaction. But even those ecclesiastical

first

more modestly, confined themselves

graphical limits of their subject.

of

would show Hugo's strugmanner: it would also show

Bibliothecarius,

were apt to transcend the

astical History

closer analysis of the

of his Ecclesiastica historia

what he learned from Anastasius after

A

to their

Some books, such tell

as Bede's Ecclesi-

the history of the conversion

one region to Christianity, and much more besides; others,

century,

tell

by

Adam

of

Bremen

as a result of the missionary activity of

part of his Church history

is

like the

in the eleventh

the history of the spreading of Christianity

Northern nations ric:

Hamburg

in-

ecclesiastical as well as the geo-

of the English Nation,

Ecclesiastical History of

own

among

the

one bishop-

a splendid geographical excursus

wor-

thy of Herodotus. In the late Middle Ages, especially in England and in Italy,

ops of is

where papal authority was stronger, the succession of the Bish-

Rome was emphasised as the backbone of universal history:

this

apparent, for instance, in the Pontifical History of John of Salisbury

and

later in the Historia ecclesiastica

tolomeo Fiadoni),

who

nova of Tolomeo da Lucca (Bar-

both took the history of the popes as the guid-

ing thread. Social and political conditions in the Middle Ages naturally

favoured the writing of chronicles of individual institutions. But the notion of the Universal Church informed the telling of local events. In-

deed the notion of a Universal Church implies a paradox. Being uni-

Church history tended to embrace all the events of mankind and was therefore permanently in danger of losing its distinctive

versal.

character.

The Eusebian form

was brought back in full force by the Reformation, just as the Thucydidean form of political history was brought back by Italian political life in the age of humanism. The example of Eusebius acted far more directly than the example of ecclesiastical history

of Thucydides. In 15 19 Luther

made

himself familiar with Eusebius in

Rufinus' translation. In 1530 Caspar Hedio published the Chronica

der alten christlichen Kirchen aus Eusebius und der Tripartita. Flacius Illyricus

course

and

his

team of centuriators knew

— and the same can be said of

all

their Eusebius

by heart, of

the ecclesiastical historians

I50

Ecclesiastical Historiography

who worked after them, be it in the Protestant or in the CathoUc camp. What both Protestants and CathoHcs wanted to prove was that they had the authority Consequently the

of the

first

centuries of the

Church on

their side.

ecclesiastical history that the religious controversies

of the sixteenth century

demanded was

Church

special churches. Eusebius

—not a history of

a history of the Universal

was

the

model

of

a universal historian of the Church, his concern with the apostolic sees

was

still

helpful,

and

his collection of

documents and quotations was

the natural starting point for further erudite research. In

many ways

The standards

Flacius Illyricus

of precise

went beyond

sixteenth than in the fourth century.

the

new

his

Eusebian model.

far more severe in the Above all the questions asked by framework of the history of the

documentation were

controversialists within the

Universal Church were different from those of Eusebius. Eusebius dealt with heresies, but he

events of the

first

had no suspicion that the very course

of

Christian centuries could be disputed and that there

might be more than one interpretation of basic events. The position of St. Peter,

the development of ecclesiastical hierarchy, the origin

velopment of

at least certain

and de-

sacraments were not a matter of contro-

They were, needless to say, at the centre of attention both by Flacius Illyricus and by Cesare Baronio, who, after attempts by others, at last produced the Catholic answer to the Protestant ecclesiasti-

versy to him.

cal historiography.

What

characterises the

Reformation and Counter-Reformation

is

new

historiography of the

the search for the true im-

age of Early Christianity to be opposed to the false one of the rivals

whereas Eusebius wanted to show

how

triumphant from persecution. The idea of a

had been

central to Eusebius, therefore

for Flacius, Baronio,

much with

and

had emerged Christian nation, which

Christianity

became devoid

of any reality

They were concerned not so with Christian institutions and doctrines.

their followers.

the Christians as

Yet there can be no doubt that in their efforts to establish the true

development of Early Christianity the ancient historians of Eusebius' school were constantly in their minds. The immense labour of Scaliger

on Eusebius' chronology, and

Valesius'

commentary on Eusebius and

the other ancient ecclesiastical historians, are study.

When Casaubon and

among the

results of this

Salmasius wanted to attack Baronio's

re-

Ecclesiastical Historiography

liability as a historian,

ans. In the

Prolegomena to

Prolegomena

nii

they turned freely to the early Church histori-

in

his Exercitationes

XVI ad Cardinalis

Baro-

Annales (1614) Casaubon eloquently emphasises

the importance of Eusebius and his school in comparison with the later decline of ecclesiastical history.

Church was not

in dispute,

As long

as the notion of a Universal

Eusebius remained the source of inspira-

The enormous, almost pathological, in the seventeenth and eighteenth cen-

tion for ecclesiastical historians.

output of ecclesiastical history

becomes more and more involved

turies

more and more

in discussions of details,

diversified in theological outlook, but

diates the basic notion that a Universal

Church

exists

it

and

never repu-

beyond the

in-

dividual Christian communities. Even the revolutionary Gottfried Arnold,

who

sees the real

Church outside every

existing denomination,

does not yet doubt that the true ecclesia exists somewhere.

The

Church was bound to change its character when an invisible, Universal Church was no longer taken for

history of the

the existence of

granted

— and therefore the praeludium

had prefaced

his history

moment

in

It is

at least controversial,

if

not

of course impossible to indicate the ex-

which the history of the Church began to be studied

the history of a

Some may

heaven with which Eusebius

on earth became

superfluous or ridiculous. act

in

human community

as

instead of a divine institution.

think that the turning point

is

represented by the Institu-

Johann Lorenz von Mosheim which appeared in 1755, others may put the burden on Hegel's pupil Ferdinand Christian Baur, others again may well think that Max Weber tionum historiae

ecclesiasticae of

with his Sociology of Religions was the

Church on a any other

level

human

would go back tro

Giannone,

and

first

to put the Christian

with any other religious society society. If

to the

who

first

I

had

to produce

— or perhaps with

my own

half of the eighteenth century

candidate,

and name

meditated deeply on the relation between

I

Pie-

ecclesi-

and about 1742 wrote in prison a sketch of the history of ecclesiastical history which could be published only in astical

political history

1859 {Istoria del Fontificato di Gregorio Magno in Opere di Pietro Giannone, ed. Bertelli-Ricuperati, Naples, 1971, 964). The truth is of course that the historians of the Church are

still

divided on the fun-

damental issue of the divine origin of the Church. The number of

152

Ecclesiastical Historiography

professional historians

who

take the Church as a divine institution

and Can therefore be considered the followers

of Eusebius

—increased

World War. On the other hand the historians who study the history of the Church as that of a human institution have consolidated their methods. They have rather than decreased in the years after the First

been helped by the general adoption

in historiography of those stan-

dards of erudite research which seemed at one time to have been confined to ecclesiastical historians

forget that

Eduard Meyer was,

and

controversialists.

at least in

We

Germany, the

sometimes

first

nontheo-

logian to write a scholarly history of the origins of Christianity, and this

happened only

in 19 21. It

is

in the supernatural character of the lieve in

it

which

is

really

who beheve who do not be-

the dispute between those

Church and those

behind the rather tedious dissertations on the

"Begriff der Kirche bei den Kirchenhistorikern" and the "Gegenstand

der Kirchengeschichte." Those a divine institution which to face the difficulty that

who

accept the notion of the Church as

different

is

from the other

Church history

institutions

have

reveals only too obviously a

continuous mixture of political and religious aspects: hence the

made by Church

dis-

two centuries between internal and external history of the Church, where internal means (more or less) religious and external means (more or less) political. By contrast the historians of the Church as a worldly institution

tinction frequently

have to reckon with the belief

no

what has

historians of the last

difficulty of describing

without the help of a

existed through the help of a belief.

reconciliation

is

possible between these

As

two ways

far as

I

can

see,

of seeing the his-

tory of the Church; though love for truth, respect for evidence, and care for details can do much, and have done much, to help mutual un-

derstanding

and tolerance, even collaboration, of

believers

and

unbelievers.

At the beginning of

this

imposing movement of research and con-

troversy there remains Eusebius of Caesarea. In 1834 Ferdinand Christian

Baur wrote

in

Tubingen a comparison between Eusebius and He-

Comparatur Eusebius Caesarensis historiae ecclesiasticae parens cum parente historiarum Herodoto Halicarnassensi We can accept this comparison and meditate on his remark that both Herodotus rodotus:

.

and Eusebius wrote under the inspiration freedom.

of a

newly estabUshed

Conclusion

At the beginning of these the

first

part of a trilogy.

I

six lectures

want

I

said that

1

conceived them as

to explore in future courses the conflict

between the Greek and the Jewish vision of the world where petent to study

it,

that

certain aspects of

pone

my general

function, limits,

conclude

is,

in the Hellenistic period;

modern

historical research.

my

I

am com-

want

to face

shall therefore post-

conclusion, which implies questions about the nature,

and methods of

historical research.

this first series of lectures

the limits of

I

and

I

strictly

But

I

may perhaps

with a few remarks confined within

personal experience.

was young I was told by my teachers that Herodotus invented history, and Thucydides perfected the invention. The later ancient historians corrupted what Thucydides had perfected. Thucydides did not come into his own again until Machiavelli and Guicciardini re-

When

I

vived the ancient conception of political history. True, the Christian

was a potential contribution to a better historiogMiddle Ages did not produce real historians. The po-

idea of Providence raphy. But the

tentialities of the providential

until the eighteenth century,

was

conception of history were not realised

when

the Heavenly City of

secularised into the Heavenly City of Voltaire.

St.

Augustine

The next

step

was

Romantic idea of History, which combined Thucydides with Voltaire. Some of my teachers preferred Ranke as the model historian, others preferred Droysen or even Dilthey. But the scheme was funda-

the

mentally the same. tion) in

Meinecke.

It is It

to be found in Croce

was presented

to the

and

(partly by implica-

American public

1949 by a very authoritative representative of German

as late as historical

^53

Conclusion

154 thought, Hajo Holborn, in an article on Greek and

Modern Concepts

of History in the Journal of the History of Ideas.

my generation had to think principles of my own subject. Slowly,

Like every student of ancient history of

again about the most elementary

and yet imperfectly,

have formed a

I

between ancient

relation

thought.

Some

I

much more complex picture

historical

of the

thought and modern historical

of the elements of the picture

—

them, probably not even the most important

— I

certainly not

all

of

have tried to present

in these lectures.

Antiquity did not create one type of history only. types.

come

Who

wants to understand what historiography

to terms with this plurality of types.

the disappearance of the powerful

Maccabees

is

a

major problem

have shown that vive,

Hebrew

A

and very useful

to

many

about has to

is

to have

shown

hope

I

Thucydides that he

also to

really re-

Herodotean tradition of historiography did it

was

that

historiography after the

in the history of ideas.

we must not concede

placed Herodotus.

hope

I

created

It

to prevent history

sur-

from becoming an ex-

One is entitled to be suspicious like Werner Jaeger when they cannot include He-

clusive instrument of political analysis.

even of great scholars

rodotus in their idea of paideia.

Greek historiography

tion of

sion of an alien product.

good or history

ill

the future of

also

It

in

became obvious

Rome was more

that the recep-

than mere transmis-

The manner of this reception determined for European historiography. European national

and historiographical classicism derived from

it.

But

at least

Roman historian had the spiritual energy to examine his own place in his own time without being unduly intimidated by the Greeks. one

This historian, Tacitus, was one of the masters of modern political

thought from the Counter-Reformation to the early nineteenth century.

The very extent

of

his

influence

among

nonhistorians

is

significant.

Tacitus initial

was from

the start an

ambiguous

writer.

There was no such

ambiguity in Eusebius. His Ecclesiastical History was a formi-

dable assertion of independence from the State and of intolerance to-

wards the unbeliever and the

heretic. This attitude has

source of the vitality of ecclesiastical history

down

remained the

to the nineteenth

century.

Equally important seems to

me

the role played by the antiquarians

Conclusion

155

in historical thought. In Antiquity

and

in the

Renaissance historians

were seldom able to reach out to the remote past and only seldom did they handle original evidence or care for cultural history.

It

was

left

to

the antiquarians to organise the study of cultural history and to ex-

plore the remains of the

more remote

past.

It is difficult

to separate an-

tiquarianism from biographical research. Biography, which

peared

in the fifth

can deny

The

of a

mixed genre:

it still is.

ap-

Roman

century and flourished in Hellenistic and

was always something

times,

first

But nobody

its vitality.

influence of the antiquarians

is

also apparent in ecclesiastical

The ability with which ecclesiastical historians assimilated the methods of antiquarian research contributed to their strength. The political historians absorbed the methods and aims of the antiquarians only later and more slowly.

history.

Now in

one sense the struggle between antiquarians and historians

The antiquarians are no longer needed as the custodians of cultural history and of archaelogical remains: they are therefore disappearing. But there is another aspect of antiquarian work which is not obsolete. The antiquarians liked systematic handbooks and static descriptions. Though unable to grasp the changes, they were certainly able to trace the connections. Pure historians know what changes are, but are less good at discovering what is structural. As long as historians cannot produce a remedy for this deficiency, sociology will remain is

over.

the refurbished

Two minds.

form of antiquarianism which our age

questions are in

One

my mind

just as they are,

I

requires.

am

sure, in

your

whether sociology and history can ultimately remain

is

separate disciplines.

The other

is

whether an

ecclesiastical history has

the right to exist in the present conditions of historical research.

Let

me remind you

by way of conclusion that

avoided discussing the more profound reasons

man methods

the

have purposely

Greek and Ro-

of history writing were revived in the Renaissance.

tiquity thought

made

why

I

man

to be mortal

—nature

the individual immortal but

An-

to be immortal. Christianity

was prepared

to accept the

end of

nature as an event to be expected in the foreseeable future. Machiavelli,

Guicciardini,

in individual

Commynes, Mariana, Hayward no doubt

immortality and

they remained

members

in the transience of nature, in

believed

so far as

of the Christian society. But as historians they

156

Conclusion

were concerned to bestow

literary

immortality on mortal beings and

which was expected to

to provide useful information for a world

The separation

last.

modern historiography. Paradoxically, Christian ideas penetrated into modern historical books only in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when faith in Christianity was at its lowest. This was due to the attempt at giving one meaning to the historical process as a whole from the of religion

and

politics

is

at the root of

—

origins of the

world to the triumph of reason or to the advent of the

classless society.

When

already been shaped

that happened,

upon

modern

methods had

historical

Modern philosophy

their ancient models.

of

methods — on a — on a Christian — and modern basis — have never quite agreed with each would take another book— one which should probably not be able write —

history

basis

historical

other.

classical

It

I

to

to

is

offered an

disentangle the implications of this elementary fact.

An

ancient historian must be particularly grateful

if

he

opportunity to speak to the students of the humanities at large. Only

by these contacts can he

how much more The Sather

realise

how narrow

intelligent the students of

Classical Lectures are a

encounters, so famous that

it

his

normal outlook

modern

is,

history are.

famous occasion

has been observed that a

for these wider

man makes

his

reputation by being invited to deliver them and loses his reputation by delivering them.

Whatever may be the outcome encounters.

in

my

case,

I

am

grateful for the

Index of Names

Achikar, 15 Acts of the Apostles, 140 Acts of the Christian Martyrs, 27

Adam

of Bremen, 138, 146,

148-149

Addison, J., 72 Adgandestrius, 110 Adimari, A., 126

Aehus Catus, Sextus, 93 Aeneas, 89, 91, loi Aeschylus, 15, 17 Agathias, 7, 145 Agnellus of Ravenna, 69, 133—135, 137 Agricola, 117 Agustm, Antonio, 57 Alembert, J. d', 127—128 Alexander Polyhistor, 68 Alfieri, V., 128 Alfoldi, A.,

104

Amelot de La Houssaye, A.-N., 129

Ammianus

Marcellinus, 24, 120, 143 Anastase, Pere (L. A. Guichard), 56

Anastasius Bibliothecarius, 137, 147, 149 Antiochus of Syracuse, 59 Antonius Primus, 114 Apollo, 89, 122

ApoUonius of Rhodes, 64 Arias Montano, B., 86 Aristarchus, 40 Aristobulos, 46 Aristotle, 40, 46, 62, 64, 66,

Arminius, no, 122

Artaxerxes III Ochos, 11 Athanasius, 141

Athenaeus, 58 Augustine, St., 68-69, 82, 146, 153 Augustus, 7, 68, III— 112, 139 Aventinus, Johannes, 121 Azubius (Salomon ben Judah Ezobi), rabbi at Carpentras, 55 Bacchini, B., 132—135

Bacon, R, 71, 127 Bagoas, 11 Barberini, Cardinal Francesco, 55—56 Baronius, C, 134, 150 Baur, F. C, 151— 152 Bayle, John, 82 Bayle, Pierre, 74, 126 Bede, 83—84, 146, 149 Beloch, K.J., 6 Belshazzar, 11

Bembo,

P.,

81

Beroaldus, Philippus, 122 Berossus, 98

Bickerman, E.J., 26, loi Bierlingius, F. W., 72 Biondo, Flavio, 70-71, 82-83, 133 Bloch, Marc,

99

Arnim, H. von, 105

i

Boccaccio, G., 70, 120 Boccalini, T., 122, 125-126 Bodin, Jean, 123, 126 Boece, Hector (Boethius), 82

Arnold, Gottfried, 151

Boeckh, A., 74 Boissier, G., 128

Arrian, 30, 46

Bonfini, A., 81

Artapanus, 25, 39 Artaxerxes I Macrocheir, 6, 11 Artaxerxes II Mnemon, 10

Bosio, A., 74 Bossuet, J. B., 73 Botero, Giovanni, 124

157

Index

158 Botta, C, 130 Bowra, C. M., 93 Bruni, Leonardo, 49,

Cremutius Cordus, 113 Creuzer, F., 50 81, 85, 121

Critias, 63

Bude, G., 71, 123

Croce,

Buonarroti, Filippo, 58 Burckhardt, J., 67, 74, 76

Ctesias, 7, 10, 40, Cyrus, 8, II

Caecilius of Calacte, 25 Caesar, Julius, 108, 113, 121, 128

Daniel,

Callimachus, 64, 100 Camden, W., 82, 129

Campanella, T., 55 Cano, Melchor, 146 Canonherius (P. A. Canoniero), 125-126 Casaubon, I., 49, 150-151 Cassiodorus, 83—84, 120, 144, 146—147

B.,

153

46

Book of, 11, 21—22, 28 Dares Phrygius, 146 Darius the Great, 7-9, 14 Davanzati, B., 123

C, 129 De Dominis, A.M., 134 Davila, E.

Mme

Deffand, Marie du, 127 Delphi, 88-90

Cato the Elder, 47, 92—93, 95—97, 106 Celtis, Conrad, 121

Demetrius (Jewish historian), 25, 98 Demetrius of Phalerum, 64, 98 Demetrius Poliorcetes, 116 Demochares, 116 Democritus, 15

Chaereas, 103

De

Charon

Descartes, R., 29

Cassius Hemina, 97 Castor of Rhodes, 68

of Lampsacus, 10

Sanctis, G., 93

C, 128

P., 123 Chenier, M.-J., 128 Chronicles, Books of, 16

Desmoulins,

Ciaceri, E., 93 Ciampini, G. G., 72,

Dikaios of Athens, 38 Dilthey, W., 153

Charron,

74

Cicero, 39, 47, 92--93. 95-97, 100, 107,

123 Cincius Alimentus, 90, 97 Claudius, Emperor, 68, iii— 112 Claudius Caecus, Appius, 91

Deutero-Isaiah, 17 Dicaearchus, 64, 66

Dio Cassius, 48, 110, 112— 113, 116 Diodes of Peparethus, 10 Diodorus, 9, 40, 68, 129 Diogenes Laertius, 63, 65, 140 Dionysius of Halicarnassus, 25, 40, 46,

Clemens (Pseudo-), 138 Clement of Alexandria, 21 Cleodemus, 25

49, 60, 66, 69, 84, 91, 94 Dionysius of Miletus, 10

Clitarchus, 59 Cloelia, 104

Domitian, 118— 119 Dondi, G., 70 Dorislaus, I., 125

P., 130 Collingwood, R. G., 29 Commynes (Philippe de Comines), 107, 155 Comte, A., 79 Condorcet, M.-J.-A.-N. Caritat de, 77 Connor, W. R., 45 Constantine the Great, 139 Constantius of Lyons, 84

CoUetta,

Diyllus, 39

Dornseiff, Driver, T.

F., F.,

9

29

Droysen, J.G., 76-77, 153 Dudith, Andreas, 49

Dupuy, J., 55 Dupuy, R, 55 Durkheim, E., 78

Coriolanus, 94, 97

Eldad-Hadani, 26

Corneille,

Emilio, Paolo, 81

P.,

49

Courbaud, E., 131 Crashaw, R., 126 Craterus, 66 Cratippus, 44

Empedocles, 14 Ephorus, 44-47, 59—60, 64, 87 Epictetus, 26, 129 Epicurus, 140

Index

I

Epiphanius, 144, 147 Eprius Marcellus, 112 Este, Rinaldo d', Duke of Modena, 132 Esther, Book of, 6, 11-13, 15, 22 Euagrius Scholasticus, 145

Grote, G., 74 Grotius, Hugo, 11, 55, 125, 129 Guarini, Guarino (Guarino Veronese),

121 Guicciardini,

107, 122, 153, 155

F.,

Eupolemus, 25 Eusebius of Caesarea, 25, 27, 84, 98, 137-152 passim, 154 Ezra, Book of, 6, 10— 11, 13—14, 16—17, 21, 23

Hannibal, 88, 90, 103-104 Hayward, John, 129, 155 Hecataeus of Abdera, 9, 25, 46 Hecataeus of Miletus, 9, 15, 31—38 Hedio, Caspar, 149

G.W.R,

Fabia, gens, 88, 102-103, 105 Fabia, Philippe, 131

Hegel,

Maximus (Cunctator), 89 Fabius Pictor, Quintus, 47, 66, 88—108

Hellanicus, 10, 14, 62—63, loi Helvidius Priscus, 112

Fabius

passim

Heraclides Ponticus, 63, 99

Fabius RuUianus, 102—103 Fabretti, R.,

Heraclitus, 14, 34

Hercules, 25, 33, 88, loi Herder, J. G., 51 Herennius Senecio, 112

74

Fabroni, A., 58 Fazzello, T.,

22, 29, 34, 151

Hegesippus, 138

72

Fehciano, FeUce, 71 Fenelon, F. L. de SaUgnac de, 126 Ferguson, A., 77 Ferretti, G. P., 133 Fmley, M. I., 48 Firdausi, 7 Flaccus, Verrius, 95 Flacius Illyricus, M.,

149—150

Herodotus,

2, 6,

8—9, 13, 15—16, 24,

29—30, 32—42 passim, 45-46, 48, 50-53, 57, 59, 62, 79, 98-99, 130 131, 143, 149, 152., 153-154 Hesiod, 14, 31—32 Hieronymus of Cardia, 47, 100 Hill, John, 128

Flavius Josephus. See Josephus

Hippias, 60, 63, 66, 79 Hippocrates, 24

Flodoard of Rheims, 137, 148

Hitler, A., 131

Foscolo, U., 128

Hobbes, Thomas, 49, 125 Holborn, H., 154

Friedlander, L., 76 Fustel de Coulanges, N.-D., 78

Holofernes,

n,

15

Homer,

Hugo

Galba, 118 Gahleo, 56, 72 Gassendi, P., 55-56 Gatterer,

J.

143-144

Gelasius of Cyzicus, 144 GeUius, Aulus, 58, 70

Giannone, P., 151 Gibbon, E., 75-76, no, 127-128 Gildas Sapiens, 84

148—149

Huizinga, J., i Hunter, Rev. Thomas, 128 Hutten, Ulrich von, 122

C, 74

Gelasius, Bishop of Caesarea,

31, 43 of Fleury, 146,

Ibn Ezra, Abraham, 27 Ibn Khaldun, 30 Ion of Chios, 14—15, 65 Isidore of Seville, 69, Isocrates, 65, 87

83—84, 146

Goes, Damianus Golnitz,

Gomme,

a, 85-86 Abraham, 125

A. W.,

i

Gordon, Thomas, 128 Gracian, Baltasar, 130 El, 120 Gregory of Tours, 83-84, 146 Gregory the Great, 147

Greco,

Jacoby, R, 10 Jaeger, W., 154

Jason of Cyrene, 25—26 Jeremiah, 84 Jerome, St., 128 Jhering, R., 78

Johannes Diaconus, 147

i6o

Index

John of Ephesus, 145 John of Salisbury, 138, 146, 149 Jonson, Ben, 125 Jordanes, 83—84 Josephus, Flavius, 13, zo, 22, 25-28, 45, 60, 84,

Juba

II,

Judith,

140-141

King, 60

Book

of, 11, 15,

22

Medici, Cosimo I Tuscany, 122 Megasthenes, 46

Julius Africanus, Sextus, 138

Juno Regina, 89 Justinian, 145

Keson (Kaeso), 105 Kings, Books of, 13,

Manlius Capitolinus, 97 Marca, Pierre de. Archbishop of Paris, 134 Marcellinus, 45 Marchesi, C., 129 Mariana, Juan de, 129, 155 Marineo Siculo, L., 81, 83 Maurus, Archbishop of Ravenna, 133

Meinecke,

F.,

Menander

of Ephesus, 98

Merula, G., 81 Metellus, Q. Caecilius, 91 Miller, Perry,

F.

de,

55-56

152

Mommsen, T., 76-79, 93, 130— 131 Montaigne, M. de, 56, 123 Montanus. See Arias Montano Montfaucon, B. de, 11, 75, 132 Mordecai, 11, 15 Moses, 25

Lipsius, Justus, 49, 124 Livius Andronicus, 90—91

30, 47, 49, 57, 59, 71, 84, 88, 90, 94, 106—108, 113, 122—123, 2.4,

126—127,

6, 77,

i

Milton, John, 125

de, 123

Leo, Friedrich, 65, 92, iii, 131 Leto, Pomponio, 71 Libanius, 40

Livy,

Mosheim, J. Mowinckel, Miiller,

L.,

151

S.,

14

Johannes, 129

Miiller, K. O.,

12.9

76

Locke, J., 125 Lucian, 40, 48, 49 Lucretia, 104 Luke, St., 146

Miinster, Sebastian, 85, 121

Luther, M., 122, 149

Mussolini,

Muratori, L. A., 75, 135 Muret, Marc-Antoine (Muretus), 123— 124

Lycophron, 100 Lydus, John, 69 J., 73, 75, 132 Mably, Abbe G. Bonnet de, 49 Macaulay, T. B., 92-93 Maccabees, Books of, 13, 140— 141, 154; I Maccabees, 16, 21—22, 26; II Mac-

26-27

Machiavelli, N., 49, 107, 122—124, 127, 153, 155

B.,

Nabonidus,

Mabillon,

cabees,

126—

Nicephorus

25, 46, 98

6,

10— 11, 13-14,

16-17, 2.1, 23 Nero, 112, 117 Nestor, 14

Manetho,

8, 11

Naude, G., 55-56 Nebuchadnezzar, 11 Nehemiah, Book of,

Maffei, Scipione, 74 Magdeburg Centuriators, 146, 149

Mater, 89 Maimonides, 22 Malvezzi, V., 125

131

Naevius, 90—91 Nannius, Petrus (P. Nanninck), 85 Napoleon I, 128 Napoleon III, 128

Macrobius, 69

Magna

of

153

Meyer, Eduard,

La Rochefoucauld, F. Le Gendre, G.-C, 72

Grand Duke

Mens, 90

16, 19

Kircher, Athanasius, 73 Kochly, H., 76

Lactantius, 27 La Mothe Le Vayer,

de'.

Newton,

I.,

51 Callistus,

Nicomachus

145

Flavianus, Virius, 143 Niebuhr, B. G., 34, 76, 92-93

Niebuhr, R., 29 Noldeke, T., 7, 15

161

Index Nostradamus, M. de Nostradamus, M. de Numitor, 91

(father), 55 (son), 55

Odysseus, 14 Ordericus Vitalis, 146, 148 Orosius, 120, 146 Otanes, 15 Otto of Freising, 145-146

Praxiphanes, 45, 64 Procopius, 46, 143, 145 Ptolemy I Soter, 46, 64 Pyrrhus, 99-100, 103 Pythagoras, 29 Pytheas, 99 Quintilian, 59, 107

Ranke,

L.,

48, 50, 77, 153

Parthenius, 15

Rapin, Pere Rene, 49 Rhenanus, Beatus, 121 Ribadeneira, P., 126

Pascal, B.,

Ritschl, F.,

Papebrochius, D., 73, 132 Pareti, L., 93

49

Paschalius, Carolus (C. Pasquale), 124 Patin, Charles, 58, Patin, Gui, 55-56

Paul

III,

72

Pope (Alessandro Farnese), 122

Paulus Diaconus, 146 Pausanias (regent of Sparta), 13, 15, 43 Pausanias of Lydia, 58, 67 Peiresc,

N.-C. Fabri de, 54-55, 72

Perizonius,

J.,

92

150 70 Pfeiffer, R., 64 Phanodemus, 60 Philinus of Agrigentum, 103—104 Peter, St.,

Petrarch, R,

Philip Philip

II

V

of of

Macedon, 45 Macedon, 88

Philip of Side,

94-97, 103-104, 108; Carmina, 92-94, 104; Origo gentis Romanae, 96, 102; Twelve Tables, 93 Romieu, A., 128 91,

Romilly, Jacqueline de, 44 Romulus, 91, 96, 105, 113; and Remus, 94, loi— 102 Roscher, W., 50, 78

Rosinus (J. Rossfeld), 58 Rossi, Azariah de', 27 Rostagni, A., 93

Rousseau, J. -J., 127 Rubaeus, Hieronymus (G. Rossi), 133 Rubens, P. P., 55

142

Philistus of Syracuse 44, 59,

Philo of Alexandria,

76 Robertson, W., 77 Robespierre, M., 128 Rome, loi, 103; Annals of the Pontiffs,

87

26—27

Rufinus, 141, 143—144, 146—147, 149 Ruinart, Dom Thierry, 135

Philochorus, 67 Philostorgius, 144 Philostratus, 58

Photius, 9 Piccolomini, Enea Silvio, 81, 83, 121 Piso, Licinianus, 118 Plato, 29, 60, 63, 127, 129, Pliny the Elder, 58

Pliny the Younger,

140

no

Plutarch, 40, 65, loi,

no,

113, 116, 129

Poggio Bracciolini, 121

Polemon of

Ilium,

M., 81 Saint-Evremond, C. de Marguetel de, 126 Salmasius (Claude Saumaise), 125, 150 Sallust, 24, 59-60, 106—108, 113, 129 Sabellico,

66-67

Politian (A. Poliziano), 49, 70, 81 Polybius, 18, 29, 45-48, 49, 51, 59, 64,

66, 68, 85, 87, 103—104, 106, 113, 118, 121, 127, 129—130

Pontano, G., 50 Posidonius, 46, 68, 105 Possevino, A., 126

Salutati,

C, 70

Sanches, Francisco, 56 Savile, Sir Henry, 125 Scaevola, Mucins, 97 Scaliger, J.

J.,

51,

150

Schaeder, H., 10 Schelling,

Schlegel,

F. F.,

W.J., 50, 130

50

Schlozer, A. L., 74

Schwartz, Eduard, 13, 43 Scipio Aemilianus, 121 Scoto, A., 126 Scylax of Caryanda, 9, 15

Semonides of Amorgos, 31, 60

Index Seneca, 113, 119, 123—124

Tillemont,

95—96, 105 Severus, Sulpicius, 120 Sextus Empiricus, 55-57

102, 105 Timagenes, 59

S. Le Nain de, 75 Timaeus of Tauromenium, 46, 47, 99—

Servius,

Sibylline

Books, 89

Tobit,

Silenus of Calacte, 103

Socrates, 26, 56 Socrates Scholasticus, 137,

143—144

Spon, Jacob, 58 Stalin, J., 131 Steinschneider, M., 22 Stephanus, Henricus (H. Estienne), 51, 55-57, 12.3 Stesimbrotus, 65 Strabo, 40 Strada, Famiano, 126 Strasburger, H., 38 Suetonius, 65—66, 69, 110, 113, 116, 129

W., 131 Syme, R., iii J.

Aurelius, 69

Tacitus, 2, 24, 30, 47, 49, 59, 66, 69,

109— 131 passim, 154

Tamizey de Larroque,

Troya,

C, 130

Ulrici, H.,

Sozomenus, 137, 143-144, 147 Spinoza, 27—28, 73

108,

P.,

22

Treitschke, H., 52, 77 Trogus Pompeius, 68, 146 Troy, 89

Sophocles, 15, 35, 39 Sosylus of Sparta, 103

Symmachus, Q.

of, 15,

149

Simon, Richard, 73 Smerdis (Pseudo-), 15

Silvern,

Book

Tolomeo da Lucca (Bartolomeo Fiadoni),

Sidonius Apollinaris, 120

55

Taubler, E., 77 Tertullian, 123 Themistocles, 15, 17, 38, 43 Theodoretus, 137, 143-144

Theodorus Lector, 144 Theodosius I, 145 Theodosius II, 143 Theophrastus, 45, 64, 99

Theopompus,

30, 39, 44-45, 59, 87, 99 Thrasea Paetus, 117 Thucydides, i, 2, 13, 16, 19, 31, 40-53 passim, 57, 59, 62-67, 71, 76, 79, 86-87, 106-107, 113, 118, 129-131,

143, 153-154 Tiberius, iii— 113, 117, 122, 126

50

Valesius (Henri de Valois), 150 Valentinianus III, 133—135, 137 Valla, Lorenzo,

50

Varro, 58, 62, 66, 68-70, 82, 92, 100,

106 Venus Erycina, 89 Vergil, Polydore, 81-83 Vico, G., 75, 127 Virgil,

Vives,

89 J. L,,

50

Arouet de, 51, 75, 77, 126-127, 153

Voltaire, F.-M.

Vossius, G.J., 71 Vossius, I., 49

Walpole, Horace, 128

Weber, Max, 78-79, 151 Wilamowitz, U. von, 13, 15—16, 38, 43 William of Malmesbury, 69, 83, 138 Wimpfeling, Jacob, 81, 83

Winckelmann, J. Jv, 75—76 Wissowa, G., 90 Xanthus the Lydian, 10 Xenophanes, 31-32 Xenophon, 10, 44-45, 59, 65, 85-87, 113, 129

Xerxes, 13

Zeno

the Stoic, 29, 98, 140 Zopyrus son of Megabyzus, Zosimus, 143

10,

39

History/ Qassical Studies

"These lectures are vintage Momigliano, full of deep learning, new sound judgments, mastery of a broad range of literature from several different cultures, and all bearing the inimitable stamp of one of this century's leading intellectual historians. ... A fascinating, original exploration of how the aims and methods of historians in Israel, Greece, and Rome helped shape the development of Western historiography." ^Ronald S. Stroud, University of California, Berkeley associations,

—

"Reading the lectures today is to be dazzled by one illuminating insight after another, as though one were walking down a shady colonnade threaded with shafts of sunlight."

—

"To return

to

the splendors

^Peter

Green, Times Literary Supplement

[Momigliano' s] work

and miseries

... is to regain contact

with

all

of Western historical writing,

from

its

The Classical Foundations will richly analyzes texts but avoids abstractions. ... It offers unforgettable portraits painted with consummate accuracy, dazzling speed, and a stunning range of techniques." Anthony Grafton, The New Republic origins to the present.

reward

its

reader.

.

.

.

It

—

"This work stands as a model of limpid, translucent prose. Momigliano reveals a present in which the past is still vital."

.

.

.

—^Robert Taylor, The Boston Globe

"The book is marvelously erudite, using the historiography of the ancient world as a stepping stone to march through the ages." ^Erich S. Gruen, author of The Hellenistic World and the Coming of Rome

—

Arnaldo Momigliano was Professor of Ancient History at University College London from 1951 until 1975 and Alexander White Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago from 1975 until 1987.

The

late

i

Berkeley 94720

T

7fi

SED

076703

ISBN 0-SED-D7fl7D-S